FDR - Jean Edward Smith [1]
Roosevelt seized the opportunity. He galvanized the nation with an inaugural address (“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) that ranks with Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, declared a banking holiday to restore confidence in the nation’s banks, and initiated a flurry of legislative proposals to put the country back on its feet. Under FDR’s energetic leadership the government became an active participant in the economic life of the nation. More important, he restored the country’s confidence. Roosevelt revolutionized the art of political campaigning, revitalized the Democratic party, and created a new national majority that included those previously cast aside. His fireside chats brought the presidency into every living room in America. And what may be more remarkable, he did this while paralyzed from the waist down. For the last twenty-three years of his life, Franklin Roosevelt could not stand unassisted.
The literature on the Roosevelt era is immense. Virtually every major participant has written his or her memoirs, scholars have filled library shelves with analytic studies, and the nation’s most prolific writers have addressed the New Deal, the Second World War, and the outsize personalities who dominated American life in the 1930s and ’40s. Biographies of Franklin Roosevelt are only slightly less numerous than those of Washington or Lincoln, and there is little that has not been said, somewhere, about the president. These works are easily accessible to the student of history, yet are seldom consulted by the general public. In recent years, biographies of lesser figures—Truman, MacArthur, Eisenhower, the numerous Kennedys—have shaped popular perceptions of the period. Rummaging through the life of Eleanor Roosevelt has become a cottage industry. As a result, Roosevelt himself has become a mythic figure, looming indistinctly out of the mist of the past.
The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man. The answer most frequently suggested is that the misfortune of polio changed Roosevelt. By conquering adversity he gained insight into the nature of suffering and found new sources of strength within himself. That is undoubtedly true. But it does not go far enough. FDR’s effort to recover from polio took him to Warm Springs, Georgia. Year after year at Warm Springs he was exposed to the brutal reality of rural poverty. All around him he saw hardworking people who were “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Roosevelt’s patrician instincts rebelled, and he began to formulate the economic ideas that came to fruition in the New Deal. As governor of New York when the Great Depression hit, FDR was the only state chief executive to organize extensive relief efforts. “Modern society, acting through its government,” he said, “owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot.”
Roosevelt was too talented to be confined by the circumstances of his birth. His devotion to his career and his conviction that he was a man of destiny far outweighed any tribal loyalty. A social conservative by instinct and upbringing, he did more to alter the relationship between ordinary citizens and their government than any other American. And he shaped our notion of the modern presidency. In that sense Roosevelt was a natural. He was not especially gifted in any field except politics. But in politics he had no equal.
Roosevelt knew the Democratic party better than anyone. It was said he could draw a line on a map from the East Coast to the West Coast and name every county the line intersected.