Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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69 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Solid History by H.W. Brands, November 23, 2008
I am a big fan of H.W. Brands, so I was excited when I learned that FDR was going to be his next release. Brands' literary style is superb; he always provides ample background into the subject so that the reader walks away with a thorough understanding, yet he is able to portray these people in an engaging way so one never has the feeling of having read a dry textbook.
Traitor To His Class is an exceptional book. You get all the background, not only of FDR, Eleanor, Sara, & family, but also of the political scene of the time including TR and Woodrow Wilson, the failed economy and FDR's New Deal, WWII and Churchill from the ingenious 'lend lease' up through Pearl Harbor, Truman and ultimately his death at Warm Springs. Brands is able to place the reader inside the mindset of FDR as all of this history is being made.
It is difficult to write a concise review of such a well-researched and masterfully written work. If you've read Brands before, you'll love Traitor To His Class just as much if not more than his other works. For those who are new to Brands and are looking for an FDR biography/history, I would highly recommend this one due to the attention to detail and intelligent yet friendly presentation. You won't be disappointed.
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69 of 90 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough scholarship and an impressive eye for story., November 10, 2008
This Review was originally posted at http://blog.semcoop.com
After reading H.W. Brands 800 page biography "Traitor to His Class," I know a great deal more about FDR than I do about any member of my family, and I love my family.
Brands renders elegant the full orbit of Roosevelt's life, replete with stirring descriptions of the constellation of out-sized bodies and satellite characters who exerted their cosmic pull upon Roosevelt's political revolution.
He had help. Victorian Age America conspired for Roosevelt's benefit, and Brands' narrative sketches a turn of the century political landscape where America and the world are organized to showcase the economic, military, and moral dignity of the governing class: Episcopalians living along the Eastern Seaboard. In this time, God and Government were in the able stewardship of Republican WASPs. These upright elites had routed the South during the Civil War and spent the next few generations lording it over the nation, and from Brands portrayal, they sound not terribly unlike the World War II generation, combining "nearly all the the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and mid-western farmers to lock up the White House and Congress." The Democrats, on the other hand, were a mixed stew of immigrants, leftovers, rubes, and hayseeds, "with its shotgun multiple marriage of country and city, of southern white supremacist and northern ethnics, of Bible-thumping conservatives and agnostic liberals."
The Roosevelt's set comprised the small group of good Republican Episcopalians who really ran the world. They had names like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ellery Sedgwick, Breckinridge Long, and Endicott Peabody- an appellation that can only give itself to someone very white, or someone very, very black, such a name does not admit of temperate hues or Jews. This East Coast elite ministered to the lower classes--including Catholics-- while at the same time reminding them of their place, a dual task requiring years of preparation. To this end, Groton boarding school and the Ivy Leagues produced civic minded Anglophile federal administrators, deputies, assistants, associates, and secretaries. For reasons of constitutional fidelity, Congressmen were culled proportionally from other states across the Union, but to be sure, their congressional offices were staffed with Yalies doing the heavy lifting. As a show of magnanimity, the good Republican sons and daughters of the Union allowed their Presidents to be harvested from Ohio: "Ohio grew Presidents like Iowa grew corn."
The Northern Democratic machines worked in the way of an syndicate, where party bosses doled out jobs to recently arrived immigrants, in exchange for votes. In the South, as Mark Twain penned, the Democrats political energies were spent waxing nostalgically of the era befo' the waw, or smarting over the dread realities durin' the waw, or lamenting their shrinking holdings aftah the waw. The Western Democrats were rogues, second sons and lawless pioneers. In the end, it was the well-mannered, landed Republican Episcopalians, those who sailed for leisure and said "bully," who made sure the people's business was done.
For Roosevelt, money flowed from both bloodlines. His father, James Roosevelt, was a chummy businessman in respectable society, a widower, and casual Democrat from an established Republican clan. His mother, Sara Delano, came from drug dealers. The drug was opium trafficked on the Oriental Sea, thousands of miles away, such that William Delano could consider himself a lucrative businessman in the independent pharmaceutical trade. William Delano approved of Sara's marriage to James Roosevelt, granting a special exemption from Delano's profound and good humored political prejudice, "I will not say that all Democrats are horse thieves," he declared in a moment magnanimity. "But it would seem that all horse thieves are Democrats." And from this political accident of birth, some would call it a defect, sprang Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a traitor to his class.
But for the occasional sickness, FDR matriculated breezily and with ruddy good humor through the cold showers, dawn revelry, and the Greek declensions of Groton; the social clubs and Crimson of Harvard; and landed on his wedding day to hear Uncle Teddy toast his union with all of the ego befitting the Rough Rider. Imagine Bill Clinton walking into your wedding, one wonders if the weak would faint from his charisma or from oxygen deprivation as the air drew from the room. "Theodore, who could never resist an audience, strode forward and hypnotized the guests in his usual fashion. Years later, Eleanor recalled the moment distinctly: 'Those closest to us did take time to wish us well, but the great majority of the guests were far more interested in the thought of being able to see and listen to the President; and in a very short time this young married couple were standing alone.' Eleanor of course said nothing, although she surely hoped that her new husband would speak up. But he was as smitten as the rest. 'I cannot remember that even Franklin seemed to mind.'"
As to the players, central casting delivered a team of talent, and Brands digs through a trove of diaries and notes to fill out the desires of the much put upon Eleanor Roosevelt, who cut her social activist teeth when Roosevelt sent her out to be his eyes and ears on the streets of New York; the loyal and canny Louise Howe; plucky, do-gooding Harry Hopkins, straight-talking Wendell Willkie, the much harassed and harassing Al Smith; Francis Townsend, the retired doctor who, and by the way, begat Social Security; Walter Lippman, a reporter second only to George Will in my estimation, in expressing with linguistic felicity, the wrong side of a great many issues; the frenetic populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long, a force of blustering nature closer to Hurricane Katrina than a mere mortal; and the terrifying phenomenon of Douglass MacArthur.
Brands recounts Roosevelt's awe of MacArthur, after the General handled a group of disgruntled veterans protesting on the White House Lawn:
"You said Huey was the second most dangerous person, didn't you?" he asked Roosevelt..."You heard it all right," he answered. "I meant it. Huey is only the second. The first is Doug MacArthur. You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There's a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home. The head man in the Army. That's a perfect position if things get disorderly enough and good citizens work up enough anxiety." Roosevelt explained that he knew MacArthur from the World War. "You've never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most portentous style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle's cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final. Besides, he's intelligent, a brilliant soldier like his father before him...if all this talk comes to anything-- about government going to pieces and not being able to stop the spreading disorder-- Doug Macarthur is the man. In his way, he's as much a demagogue as Huey. He has as much ego, too. He thinks he's infallible-- if he's always right, all people need to do is to take orders. And if some don't like it, he'll take care of them in his own way."
Brands' Roosevelt grew from a self-possessed, hungry politician, making a name for himself as a Democrat whose Protestant prep school sensibilities bucked the vagaries of Tammany Hall machine politics-- Roosevelt's independent wealth purchased partial immunity from Tammany Hall's attractive structural electoral support---through to become Assistant Navy Secretary who used those Tammany skills to shunt shipbuilding jobs to his home state in earnest, far-sided preparation for a Gubernatorial run, into a crafty Washington pol who strung out Stalin for years before finally engaging in World War II, eventually relieving the pressure Stalin faced on the Eastern front of the war. One knows Brands' portrayal cuts a compelling form when even Joseph Stalin emerges as a sympathetic figure. Roosevelt's conception of the troika of world leaders (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) moved the President to cajole Stalin into having the Soviet Union "keep Hitler occupied and to kill Germans-- lots and lots of Germans. Every German who died on the easter front was one fewer the Americans and British would have to fight themselves, when their turn came."
In telling Roosevelt's story, Brands admirably blends the monumental, antiquarian, and critical aspects of the President's life.
The Monumental: Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard by cleverly-placed press statements, bank holidays, and surreptitious legislative sleights of hand tantamount to a daring feat of prestidigitation. Imagine the American economy in the body of a juggler. The juggler uses both hands to keep three balls in the air, the true artist keeps balls in the air by using one hand, Roosevelt led the nation to dare performing this act without using hands at all, and the American Economy has been supported by air ever since, and such was the religious conversion of the American economy, with the dollar dancing, dipping and defying gravity by faith alone.
The Antiquarian: Roosevelt's romantic dalliances. It's always sad when the good aren't faithful.
The Critical: Roosevelt may have achieved too much political success after his first term. With a sweeping electoral mandate and congressional majority, he became resentful of the Supreme Court, over-reached and tried mightily to change...
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"A politician, not an ideologue", December 16, 2008
The literature about Franklin Delano Roosevelt is enormous, rivaling in sheer bulk that on Napoleon, Lincoln and Jesus Christ.
Many of us can remember when any new book about FDR came with a built-in partisan agenda of either fulsome praise or furious denunciation. Many of those books came from people who had known and worked with Roosevelt. Only in fairly recent years have we reached the point where dispassionate historians can have their say, free from the whirring sound of grinding axes.
H. W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas, has weighed in with a richly detailed and well-written 824-page biography that rates high marks among the many single-volume treatments still in print. His basic verdict is favorable, but he is careful to note FDR's failings, both personal and political. TRAITOR TO HIS CLASS is neither whitewash nor prosecutorial indictment.
Roosevelt's well-known career trajectory is covered in workmanlike detail: New York state senator and later governor, assistant secretary of the navy, losing candidate for vice president in 1920, polio victim, and finally the only person in American history elected four times to the Presidency. The equally familiar details of his private life are also present: his difficult relationship with a domineering mother, his essentially loveless marriage to his cousin Eleanor (complicated, if more complication were needed, by his affair with Lucy Mercer), his wily political machinations in pursuit of self-advancement, his intense personal loyalty to trusted aides like Louis Howe and Harry Hopkins, and his careful manipulation of wartime relations with Churchill and Stalin, who may have been allies against the Nazis but were also leaders with agendas that did not always jibe with Roosevelt's wishes.
Brands teases out of the historical record ample detail about Roosevelt's well-known tactic of putting two or three people to work on the same problem independently, so he could cherry-pick ideas from each and decide on his own approach. The author also illuminates FDR's ability to give petitioners the impression that he agreed with them while not really making any specific commitments to action. Brands deftly crafts a neutral way to describe this, dubbing FDR "artful" in preserving his "intellectual autonomy." He was, says Brands, "a politician, not an ideologue."
The wide-ranging array of New Deal programs with which he fought against the Depression were, in Brands's phrase "extemporaneous and improvisatory," which seems a fair judgment. Some of them worked and some of them did not --- the most ill-advised being his effort to pack the Supreme Court with justices more in tune with his program after the Court had invalidated a large part of the New Deal as unconstitutional.
Brands also reminds us of Roosevelt's constant need to protect himself against the powerful isolationist bloc in Congress, which opposed his every move toward war preparations right up to the moment of Pearl Harbor. FDR lacked the luxuries of Churchill's "unity government" or Stalin's iron-fisted dictatorship. Even today there are those who still claim that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance but let it happen as a means of getting the U.S. into World War II --- a claim that Brands dismisses as unfounded. He also quotes Roosevelt's candid assessment of the 1945 Yalta agreements with Stalin, a longtime focal point of conservative ire (and charges of treason). Roosevelt reported to Congress that they were "the best I could do," which is pretty close to the verdict commonly accepted today.
When Roosevelt was gearing up to run for the Presidency in 1932, columnist Walter Lippmann famously dismissed him as "a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." This may well have been accurate --- but Brands, after an exhaustive examination of the record of FDR's 12-year Presidency, concludes that he rose brilliantly to the challenge.
Can it be that history may repeat itself 76 years later? Stay tuned.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn (Robertfinn@aol.com)
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