Are the Revisionists Right About FDR?

Late last year, a band of conservative Republican congressmen, seemingly motivated by an overwhelming urge to smash a liberal icon and replace it with one of their own, unexpectedly declared they would offer a resolution to remove Franklin Roosevelt's image from the dime and replace it with Ronald Reagan's. Their polar opposites among the Democrats rushed to the barricades.

Nearly sixty years after his death, Franklin Roosevelt elicits near-worshipful adulation from those who position themselves left of center in American politics.

Last year's sprawling new biography by Conrad Black, proclaiming Roosevelt the greatest person of the twentieth century, was the latest in a long line of affirmations that originated in widespread popular gratitude for FDR's leadership during the Great Depression, then eventually found numerous academic voices. The “founding fathers” of New Deal historiography–James MacGregor Burns, William E. Leuchtenburg, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.–set the tone. All had come to intellectual and political consciousness during the 1930s and had been powerfully attracted to Roosevelt . All excellent historians who set very high standards for those who followed them, they duly noted some faults and failures, but the balance of their overall evaluation was far in the other direction. They and those who followed in their wake might display some regret Roosevelt had not pulled America farther in the direction of social democracy, but they left no doubt of their faith in his transcendental greatness. David Kennedy's splendid history of the Roosevelt era displays a tad more detachment, but remains within the tradition established by the founding fathers.

In his lifetime, Roosevelt was a polarizing figure. Rabid attacks came at him from a powerful conservative press, exemplified by the Hearst newspapers and the Chicago Tribune . The conservatives' Roosevelt was a devious opportunist, attracted to Stalinist communism, harboring dictatorial aspirations, and unscrupulous in his abuse of presidential power. He had failed to master the Great Depression, then had conducted a lame wartime diplomacy which had handed Eastern Europe and China to the Communist bloc. For good reasons, most historians have rejected this exaggerated indictment, although works by Gary Dean Best, Gene Smiley, and Jim Powell deliver a powerful critique of his Depression policies.

The contemporary reservations of the political center–expressed perhaps most influentially by Walter Lippmann, but found also in the editorial commentary of such newspapers as the Kansas City Star (moderately conservative) or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (moderately progressive)–have been all but forgotten.

Surely, it is time, nearly sixty years after Roosevelt 's death, to move toward a more measured evaluation.

Black especially values FDR's World War II leadership, but Roosevelt became president in 1933 during the world crisis of the Great Depression, serving six and a half years before the beginning of World War II in Europe.

For that period especially, a sober balance sheet displays both impressive achievements and great failures.

At home, FDR quite simply failed to end the Depression. After numerous ups and downs, the American economy in the summer of 1939 was barely above its level of November, 1932. The New Deal's relief programs never provided for more than half the unemployed at any one time. Its first industrial recovery program, the National Recovery Administration, was a crashing failure. Roosevelt 's subsequent resort to a polarizing politics of class conflict probably did him political good but surely got in the way of economic revival. His delight in the exercise of power–and occasional grabs for more of it (most notoriously, the plan to pack the Supreme Court)–made plausible unfounded accusations that he wanted to be a dictator.

We all know that Hitler's Germany , utilizing loathsome totalitarian mechanisms, achieved full employment by the last half of 1935. It is less well understood that the conservative British National Government of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain brought its people out of the Depression at about the same time, that its much-debunked dole paid a minimal benefit to every unemployed Briton, and that it maintained a vigorous agenda of social programs.

At a time when the world's democracies sorely needed a common front, Roosevelt failed to provide leadership. His most fateful decision, after first raising hopes of constructive American engagement, was to scuttle the World Economic Conference of 1933. He thus sent every nation on its own in dealing with an international economic problem that cried out for an international solution. An embittered Neville Chamberlain four and a half years later wrote privately, “It is always best & safest to count on nothing from the Americans except words.” At no time before the war did FDR make a sustained, consistent effort to lead the democracies at a time when fascism and militarism were on the march.

Yet neither was Roosevelt an abject failure. Ordinary people conceived of the Depression as more like an epidemic than a problem of economic policy; they hoped primarily for treatment of its symptoms. FDR's New Deal provided this to millions, in the form of temporary jobs, relief checks, rural electrification, agricultural price supports, backing for labor unions, and more. His charisma and rhetorical talents made his leadership more than a transactional exchange of votes for benefits. The common people felt his concern and repaid it with their devotion. It is easy to contrast him unfavorably to theoretical alternatives, but in real life he outshone an opposition that often found itself reduced to spluttering, incoherent rage. (Can anyone really imagine President Landon?) Remarkably, there are persuasive indications that most ordinary people in other nations saw him as democracy's greatest symbol, despite his near-total abdication of international leadership.

He would be a greater war manager than depression fighter, but here also not without his missteps, especially his optimism about the possibilities of postwar cooperation with Josef Stalin. And his wartime achievement was made possible only by Winston Churchill's bulldog leadership of Britain during the eighteen months between the fall of France and Pearl Harbor .

In 1915, the Conservative party leader Andrew Bonar Law, remarked of Churchill: “He has the defects of his qualities, and as his qualities are large, the shadow which they throw is fairly large also.” Law's words apply equally to the great American with whom Churchill would collaborate a quarter-century later.

Churchill's own failures were many; his Greatest Hour consumed only a fleeting five years of a long career. Both he and Roosevelt force historians to confront the possibility that personality and presence are more important than lists of legislation and administrative actions that can be tallied up on the pages of a debit/credit ledger. Still, that ledger may also give us perspectives otherwise lost in the brilliance of a charismatic supernova.

Intellectuals and ideologues may still have strong feelings about Roosevelt, but most of our contemporaries have no personal memory of Roosevelt and no gut sense of the passions of the 1930s. In that regard, let us admit that the historian founding fathers possessed insights that we do not. Above all, let us beware of the conceit that our detachment makes us “more objective.” That said, there is little to be lost and much to be gained by a more restrained look at the man who remains the most important American president of the twentieth century.

What about the dime? Let's keep him on it. He deserves it–for himself, for those former polio patients for whom he started the March of Dimes in 1938, and for those who since the 1950s have not had to fear the disease.