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A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

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I spent most of the summer reading this wonderful book. I only read it on the weekends relaxing on my porch and was always anxious to reacquaint with the young man who would become FDR. It is a testament to this biography that after reading almost 800 pages I was sorry to see it end.

With all this praise one might think that I understood FDR. I finished this book no less able to draw a conclusion about the man who would lead our country through two of its greatest crisis. Question abound in my mind that probably can never be answered. The first and most difficult question is what was so special about this man that he could lead. As this book points out he was not a giant intellect,nor a hard worker or even a visionary. Somewhat like our current President he muddled through his youth. Most of what he accomplished was a result of his family name. The easy answer is that polio changed him. That is not satisfying when it is recognized he is nominated for Vice President before he got sick.

I remain uncertain and Mr. Ward does not really help in answering the unanswerable other than possibly in his prologue. From reading this book one might come to the conclusion that FDR did not really relate to anyone. He lived a distant life from his wife and children. Possibly it was only Lucy Mercer who reached him. He was dominated by his mother but even there he was independent. LOuis Howe and Missy Le Hand were totally devoted to him but it does not appear he spent much time with Missy when she become ill.

His battle with polio is beautifully told. I take away from that his ability to be optimistic and positive against all odds. He showed perserverance but only really when his ambition was involved. Yet even in this case he chose to spend his time in Warms Springs somewhat removed from the other visitors and did not spend time with him family.

As the above review shows, a First Class Temperment is a wonderful book because it presents the subject in tremendous detail. It does not draw conclusions. Mr. Ward introduces us to FDR in transition. We meet him and see him grow. We see what kind of president he will be. I admire FDR. I am not sure that I like him much. I know I loved the journey and thank Mr. Ward for setting it out for us.

I hope that Mr. Ward will read the review and maybe indicate what he thought of his subject. Maybe he will even write the next volume.

For me I will continue my education by rereading No Ordinary Times, Conrad Black's biography and Arthur Schlesinger"s 3 volume set. I doubt it will answer any of my questions but I look forward to the experience.

Geoffrey Ward thanks for the experience.

Since I was about nine years old back in the 1960s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been my favorite U.S. president. My mother, who grew up poor in the Great Depression, is probably responsible for this. She bought me a kiddie biography about FDR which I devoured many times over. She also encouraged my interest in Eleanor Roosevelt, whose life I relived through another kiddie biography. My mother made sure during one summer vacation that our family visited Hyde Park. Time did not abate my fascination with the thirty-second president. As a young teen, I borrowed from our local library all the books about FDR that I could find. I wanted to know everything about his life, his political views, his achievements, and his impact on Americans, America and the world. One of the more poignant works I read in those days was Bernard Asbell's "When FDR Died," which told of the sweeping affect his death in April 1945 had on Americans. When I was in high school, my family visited Hyde Park again. This time, I was so moved that, after I got home, I wrote an account of an imaginary encounter with FDR's ghost.

Then I went to college, got married, and found employment, and my youthful obsession with FDR took a back seat to everyday concerns. But my dormant interest awoke recently when I felt compelled to watch the Biography channel's two-part special, "FDR: A Presidency Revealed," and then the HBO drama, "Warm Springs." I suddenly remembered that I had a book sitting on my shelf that I'd never seemed to have time to read, one I'd purchased some 15 years ago- Geoffrey C. Ward's "A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt," first published in 1989. The day after the "Warm Springs" drama I took the book down and read it during every spare moment, creating some spare moments that wouldn't have otherwise existed. Now that I'm done, I feel the need to share my thoughts about Ward's hefty tome.

I'm giving this book five stars, although it is not quite a perfect work. I'll start with the positives. First, it's extremely well-written, and generally reads like a novel. I love the literary prologue, "The End of Algonac," a flash-forward (rather than a flashback) in which a measure of FDR's fortitude dies in 1941 with his very elderly mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, who had been the one constant in his life. The end of the last chapter, "It is Time," concludes brilliantly in 1928 with Sara excitedly climbing up the front steps of her son's brownstone in the wee hours of election night to tell him that, despite the discouraging early returns, he'd won the New York Governor's race after all.

Ward has done a superhuman job of sifting through the gargantuan archives at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the collections of papers and oral histories housed at other institutions, the ridiculous number of biographies about all the Roosevelts that came before, and his records of interviews with numerous eyewitnesses to some aspect of the lives of FDR and Eleanor. I know from experience how hard it is to synthesize and express as a readable whole the varying and innumerable strands of factoids produced by voluminous research, and I stand in awe of Ward's accomplishment.

A chief result of this accomplishment is the opportunity afforded readers to learn about the less well-known part of FDR's life-his youth. One discovers in "A First-Class Temperament" the divergent personalities possessed by Franklin and Eleanor even as newlyweds in their early twenties. In 1905, Franklin was 23 and already larger-than-life, a tall, lanky man brimming with optimism but not introspective by nature, blessed with the chiseled good looks of a Greek or Roman bust, and bursting with a charming, self-confident, effusive personality. Eleanor was 21 then, and mostly the opposite of her new husband. Plain (but cruelly, and unfairly, labeled "ugly" by her dysfunctional family growing up), shy, deferential, pessimistic and exceedingly introspective by nature, and burdened by a self-esteem that had been stomped on by others, she typically gave herself wholly to Franklin's interests and preferences, as well as those of her new mother-in-law.

In a way, the real story of Ward's book is how Franklin and Eleanor slowly broke out of their early molds and refashioned themselves in a manner that would eventually make them the most formidable and effective husband-and-wife team ever to take up residence in the White House. Eleanor would later remark that Franklin strongly desired "broad human contact," something that had been missing from his privileged but sheltered upbringing. It seemed that he entered politics for this reason. Ward brings us to the starting point of Franklin's transformational journey when he was a naïvely brash, in-your-face, freshman New York State legislator. In first running for office, Franklin took steps toward satisfying his craving for "broad human contact" by energetically and enthusiastically courting the ordinary folk of Dutchess County, although it would later become clear that he didn't have a vision for how to serve them. Nearly 20 years later, by the end of the journey, at the time he was elected Governor of New York, he had become a more measured, thoughtful politician of remarkable oratorical gifts and a coveted elder statesman of the Democratic Party.

How did this transformation occur? Certainly, his experience during the Wilson Administration as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (which saw him embark on a constructive relationship with labor almost from the beginning) and his number two place on the doomed Democratic ticket with Presidential nominee James M. Cox in 1920 afforded him the knowledge and street smarts (many would say deviousness) that he would need to advance his name and master the ropes of government. But his horrific bout with polio in 1921 at age 39 was, as virtually all historians believe, the transformative event that took his people skills in a whole new direction. Desirous as a young man of emulating his distant cousin Teddy Roosevelt to the full, he eventually found his own political identity, divorced from Teddy's blustery American chauvinism.

Eleanor, on the other hand, went from a quintessential anti-feminist who initially opposed women's suffrage (and was shocked by Franklin's support of it) to someone who returned to her first love, social work, by World War One, and, battling her shyness and insecurity, struck out on her own during the 1920s as a political activist. Ward shows that her transformation was at least partly due to her discovery of Franklin's affair with her secretary, Lucy Mercer, which meant to her that she had to rely on herself rather than others for self-fulfillment. Franklin and Eleanor stayed together, but whatever romance had existed in their lives up to that time was replaced by a unique friendship.

A thrilling, and sometimes downright spooky, common thread in Ward's book is the foreshadowing of Franklin's future greatness-not through the use of literary artifice, but simply by Ward's relation of countless anecdotes that demonstrate the loyalty and awe FDR inspired in numerous people who encountered him or who signed on with him in one way or another. In fact, predictions of Franklin's greatness came from the diverse likes of Endicott Peabody, the headmaster of his prep school (Groton) and Louis Howe, the rumpled, gruff journalist who decided to devote his life and career to Franklin. Even Josephus Daniels, Franklin's beleaguered boss at the Navy Department, good-naturedly tolerated the younger man's behavior that often bordered on being, or actually was, insubordinate, treasuring Franklin like a dear son, and marveling at his classical attractiveness and charisma. It was as if Franklin, still boyish as a thirty-something Assistant Secretary of the Navy, were walking around with the Presidential Seal floating above his head.

But the best portion of the book is Ward's sensitive and dramatic recounting of FDR's contraction of polio and how hard he worked to overcome, or at least adapt to, the severe limitations posed by his useless legs. It is a gripping human interest story told with the knowing tone of an author who, as Ward reveals in the book's source notes, had had his own battle with polio.

"A First-Class Temperament" does have some faults, mainly in some of its analyses. Ward seems unsure whether Franklin's characteristically courteous treatment of all people, regardless of social class, religion or race, was innate or, as the author tends toward, simply a matter of a patrician upbringing that emphasized graciousness. Admittedly, one of the challenges faced by Ward, and all of FDR's other biographers, is the matter of divining Roosevelt's real feelings about things when he almost always kept his feelings under close counsel, even from friends and family. Nevertheless, a reasonable conclusion may be reached that Franklin's polite manner was so effortless and natural as to mean that, at some point, he had internalized the notion of respect for others rather than just exhibited this quality as a matter of habit.

The fact that, during the 1910s, Franklin sought the company of educated Jews, who were not his "social equals," not to mention, heaven forefend, also Jewish, was puzzling and disconcerting to his wife (whose pan-humanism hadn't yet manifested itself) and mother. Just as it is reasonable to conclude that FDR actually believed in respecting others, it is unduly cynical to question the sincerity of Franklin's friendship with Henry Morgenthau. Did it matter whether Franklin had established a profound bond with Morgenthau or was just friendly with his fellow Dutchess County resident? Either way, FDR's interest in Morgenthau's companionship was not necessarily any less genuine or significant than if Morgenthau had been a social equal. Indeed, as the 1920s wore on, and Franklin was spending increasing amounts of time at his home-away-from-home, Warm Springs, Georgia, in what would become a fruitless effort to revivify his legs by swimming in the purportedly magical waters of the town, he managed to ingratiate himself with the local, economically deprived populace. Ward highlights the remarks of one of Franklin's physiotherapists to suggest that Franklin's relationship with the people of Warm Springs and its environs was merely political courtship. Yet, as one area resident fondly put it decades later, Franklin could "talk to anybody about anything." More demonstrative of Franklin's feelings for regular people were the real help and encouragement he gave fellow polios who hoped, like he did, that the waters would restore their health and vitality.

In the chapter titled "The Limits of His Possibilities," Ward levels the unfounded charge that Franklin's business investments during the 1920s were of similar recklessness to the wild speculative activities of many other businessmen during that decade. The conclusion that, by virtue of these investments FDR's conduct was no better than that of the speculators who bore responsibility for the 1929 stock market crash is completely unsupported by the information that Ward provides. The business investments that Franklin made during that decade, "...everything from selling advertising space in taxicabs to harnessing the tidal power of Passamaquoddy Bay...," sound on their face no better or worse than any number of ventures that people in America embark on all the time and do not of themselves evidence the kind of blind opportunism that led to the Great Depression. If Ward had wanted to make a point about Franklin's investments, he should have tried to show how Franklin's "schemes" were qualitatively comparable to the schemes of the careless speculators of the era.

Franklin's intellect doesn't get an entirely favorable review, either, as if the author is surreptitiously captivated by the viewpoint of Roosevelt's misguided detractors that he was an intellectual lightweight. On the one hand, Ward relates the young man's articulateness, sharp wit, ability to dictate a series of flawless letters in rapid succession, and talent for quickly assimilating huge quantities of information and then using them, for example, to skillfully fend off tough questioning by a U.S. Senate panel during his time at the Navy Department. "A First-Class Temperament" also quotes extensively from correspondence Franklin wrote to members of his family and to his friends, which often reveal an impressive literary flair, such as this excerpt from a letter written while sailing to Europe during World War One:

...the good old Ocean is so absolutely normal-just as it has always been-sometimes tumbling about and throwing spray like this morning-sometimes gently lolling about with occasional points of light like tonight-but always something known-something like an old friend of moods and power....

Despite all this evidence of a good mind, the book's introduction has FDR, as the president-elect in 1932, paying a visit to the ancient, recently retired Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, after which Holmes remarked that his visitor had a "second-class intellect" but a "first-class temperament." The anecdote serves as the source of, and justification for, the book's title. However, the author points out that Franklin never opened the books he avidly collected. Ward thus intimates that Franklin didn't read books at all, even though it was possible that FDR merely didn't read the books (perhaps vintage volumes) that he sought to line the walls of his library. But if he didn't read anything of value, where did his demonstrable literary talent come from?

A lengthy footnote examines Franklin's youthful reputation for effeminacy among the testosterone-drenched Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family (headed by Teddy) due to his gentility, slender rather than hulking body type, and stunning facial features. Understandably, this reputation was a source of frustration for Franklin, who aspired to be like Cousin Teddy, and avidly engaged in such "manly" activities as hunting and fishing. The author expands his discussion of Franklin's perceived feminine side- and, by doing so, teeters on the brink of sexism-when he again questions FDR's intellect in pointing to his apparent penchant for solving problems intuitively rather than through logic, which, according to the author, Roosevelt was unable to master. Ward fails to reconcile the inconsistency of a supposedly illogical nature with Franklin's ability to swiftly consume and cleverly use large quantities of information to his advantage in arduous U.S. Senate hearings.

Ward seems to want to depict Franklin as brave and resilient during his battle with polio, but dilutes this portrait in repeatedly reminding the reader of FDR's upbringing in which he was expected to be stoic and uncomplaining. The author points to the conduct of Franklin as a boy, emotionally steady as his tooth was accidentally knocked out and the underlying nerve exposed, and the calm demeanor of his mother, who, in her late sixties and touring a foreign country with some of her grandchildren, fell and injured her thigh but continued sightseeing. The reader must conclude that neither of these instances of stoicism can be considered a match for Franklin's tenacity in overcoming his polio-induced disability. Neither his mother nor Eleanor expected that he would or could continue with his political career once it was clear that Franklin's legs were paralyzed. That he toppled an apparently insurmountable obstacle no one could have predicted.

One may justifiably overlook the problems with Ward's discussions of certain aspects of Franklin's personality and conduct and readily acknowledge the prodigiousness of the writer's multi-layered, complex portrait of a man who to this day continues to inspire new biographies and in April was selected by Time magazine as the 20th century's second most important person (next to Albert Einstein). In the final analysis, "A First-Class Temperament" is the sort of book that fans of FDR or of American history will mull over and hungrily revisit long after first voraciously reading the book's 800-odd pages of facile writing.

Ward's first 2 book's on FDR's life are a masterpiece. When will he finish this epic account?

Geoffrey Ward shares the ability of David McCullough, and that is to take a scholarly topic and write about it intelligently and coherently. He also makes the journey fun for the reader and he showcases this ability in this excellent book. FDR as a young man (pre polio) was a very different man from the President he was to become. Polio was the defining moment that both changed FDR and deepended his compassion and understanding for the downtrodden.

In this second volume of Ward's Roosevelt trilogy, he illuminates FDR's dominating mother and the problems she caused between Franklin and Eleanor. One almost cringes when the obtrusive Sarah Roosevelt plans her son's honeymoon, buys homes for him (with connecting doors for her to intrude upon)and basically usurps FDR's own decision-making processes.

Franklin Roosevelt was not a great man, or a particularly engrossing man when young. He achieved greatness only after tragedy befell him, but Ward sets the stage here for Roosevelt's later greatness. If you're interested in Roosevelt or the flighty, banal rich New York set of WWI and the Washington social scene, then this is your cup of tea. It is also a fine book.