The Ways, Means, and Ends of FDR

David Beito’s FDR: A New Political Life could have been subtitled A New Political Death. Beito synthesizes what is now two generations of Roosevelt revisionism, though it has not deterred scholars from ranking FDR among our greatest presidents. 

Beito concludes that “FDR was not a great president nor even a good one.” Roosevelt, inter alia: exacerbated the Great Depression; violated civil liberties in both domestic and foreign policy; ignored the grievances of black Americans; needlessly interned tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans; scuttled international efforts to coordinate depression-recovery policy; all but goaded the Japanese into war; and heedlessly adopted an “unconditional surrender” policy that prolonged the war, with especially catastrophic results for European Jews, whose fate concerned him not at all. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Beito shows that, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, FDR used enlisted men to entrap USN sailors, many presumed to be engaged in homosexual activity, in the “Newport Sex Scandal.” He got away with a Senate committee rebuke, which he interpreted as a partisan attack and to which he attributed his contracting polio. Roosevelt accused Herbert Hoover of being the eleventh wealthiest man in America when that was not even remotely true. (He called Hoover “Herbie the Hoove.” Beito adroitly observes, “Like a much later president from New York, FDR enjoyed tagging his opponent with an unflattering nickname.”) Roosevelt refused to cooperate with Hoover in the long interregnum (November 1932 to March 1933), claiming that he had been elected on certain uncompromisable principles. FDR sounds much like Lincoln in the “secession winter,” except that Lincoln forthrightly expressed his principles, while FDR behaved like what Hoover accurately called “a chameleon on plaid.” FDR wanted the economic crisis to be as dire as possible when he took office, to maximize his policy latitude. His failure to end the depression is now almost universally acknowledged. Beito rightly says that if FDR had not sought a third term, he would have widely been considered a failed president. World War Two salvaged his reputation, but Beito draws on responsible revisionist accounts about “the good war,” such as Sean McMeekin’s, to question his wartime leadership. 

Beito really nails FDR for using political power to maintain political power. Roosevelt would certainly have endorsed Mr. Dooley’s maxim that “Politics ain't beanbag.” Senate committees under Hugo Black and Sherman Minton (both of whom he would appoint to the Supreme Court) shredded civil liberties and privacy rights to flay New Deal opponents. Black issued “dragnet subpoenas” that gathered millions of private telegrams from Western Union. Minton proposed a law to make the publication of “false news” a criminal offense. FDR used the Internal Revenue Service to harass his political opponents. His son Elliott later said, “My father may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution”. FDR used the Federal Communications Commission to purge the airwaves of New Deal opponents. By 1939, “not a single anti-New Deal commentator remained on the major networks.” Newspapers were not subject to FCC licensing threats, but FDR used the postal power (denying them second-class rates) and the threat of sedition prosecution to get editors to toe the line. Court historian Arthur Schlesinger tried to depict FDR as a latter-day Andrew Jackson, the tribune of the people taking down the oligarch Nicholas Biddle, president of the Bank of the United States. FDR had to browbeat Nicholas’ descendant, Attorney General Francis Biddle, to prosecute his political enemies. Biddle’s FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, objected to the wholesale internment of Japanese-Americans. Nor did FDR and his allies scruple at wiretapping. His son John said, “Hell, my father just about invented bugging.” Beito shows how FDR’s abuses forged an alliance between the left-wing American Civil Liberties Union and right-wing libertarians. 

Roosevelt began what has been called the “Brown Scare.” He and his minions depicted their opponents as brownshirt fascists just as conservatives accused their enemies of being “Reds” after the two world wars. In his annual message to Congress in 1944, in which he called for a revival of the New Deal and a “second Bill of Rights,” he warned that a “rightist reaction” like that of 1920 would mean that, while we had defeated fascism abroad, we would “yield to the spirit of fascism here at home.” 

Beito brings in a heavy indictment, but he provides the evidence. His command of the literature is capacious. And he does not descend to partisanship. FDR sometimes benefits at least from some right-handed compliments. Beito makes the astute point that big business self-interestedly embraced cartel-promotion under the National Industrial Recovery Act, and then hypocritically condemned the National Labor Relations Act’s promotion of labor cartels. (As Adam Smith put it, “Men of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”) Beito soberly rejects, for example, the latest revival of the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor but let it happen, to open a “back door” to a war he wanted, but the American people did not (Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit, 2000). Beito acknowledges that Communists had influence in the administration but downplays their impact. He concludes that Harry Hopkins was most likely not a Soviet spy, though he was a “fellow-traveler.” 

If FDR’s defenders take histories like Beito’s into account (they usually do not), they’re inclined to say that, however ineffective Roosevelt’s policies were, his heart was in the right (i.e., left) place. Beito kicks out the props of this plea as well. FDR was rather callous about suffering, never letting it impede his quest for power. Biographer Kenneth Davis saw something almost sadistic about him. Beito observes that “Roosevelt’s public persona as an amiable champion of democracy and liberalism coexisted with a considerable private vindictive streak.” As the Nation put it at the time, “When Mr. Roosevelt hates, he hates deeply and vengefully. The President never forgets an affront or injury.” In his 1936 re-election campaign, FDR reveled in and more than requited the hate that he had drawn from what he considered the American oligarchy. We often hear the story of the North Carolina mill hand who said, “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a son-of-a-bitch.” Roosevelt battened on hatred like this. As Joseph Kennedy said of his own son, Robert, he “knew how to hate.” FDR’s compassion or charity was of a peculiar kind. In 1936, he described the New Deal’s redistribution of resources — taking money from your enemies and giving it to your friends as “a government that lives in a spirit of charity.” As Margaret Thatcher said about socialism, the problem with this kind of charity is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. As Harry Truman later put it, “Inside he was the coldest man I ever met. He didn’t care about you or me.” Tellingly, Truman concluded, “But he was a great president. He brought the country into the twentieth century.” James McGregor Burns subtitled his classic biography of FDR “the Lion and the Fox.” The lion and the fox possessed the traits that Machiavelli said the modern ruler needed: force and fraud — precisely those that Cicero and classical and medieval political theorists condemned. 

One of the perennial questions in FDR historiography is whether he was merely an opportunist weathervane, a “pragmatist” who would experiment with whatever would win votes, or a progressive-modern liberal ideologue. Most historians see the former. Beito tends this way, though he notes that early in his political career, FDR was “already showing a knack for repackaging in less threatening form more controversial ideas.” He won the presidential nomination in 1932 by being all things to all Democrats. This raises the question of whether Beito understates the damage that Roosevelt did to the American constitutional system. His focus on FDR’s personal vindictiveness and incompetence suggests that Roosevelt was merely a petty tyrant, not an architectonic, regime-changing one. As Lincoln said in his first inaugural, “So long as the people retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration — through extreme wickedness or folly — can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.” We can reckon that FDR had twelve years, but how do we measure the virtue and vigilance of We the People? 

Open Universe publishers deserves credit for bringing out this important work. But it could have put more resources into it. The layout should have been more attractive, and the book’s index was cut off at “F.” Though I believe that Congress should be limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, I would make an exception if the federal government required publishers to provide footnotes and prohibited endnotes. 

Paul Moreno is the William and Berniece Grewcock Chair in Constitutional History, Professor of History, and Dean of Social Sciences at Hillsdale College.