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Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Traitor to His Cause

When I first saw the size of this book, I hesitated to read something so daunting, but I was born in 1930, my parents were Republicans and didn't know the overall picture and only saw what seemed to be waste occurring. I decided to read this book to determine the truth of events that I could remember from having been a child. Although I stray from reviewing the book per se, since this has already been adequately done, I want to show the readers how this man left a lasting impression and love by the American people, and his enemies were usually of a political nature. It is truly difficult to comprehend how an individual raised in an atmosphere of such wealth and power could turn his back on it as he did.

This author did such an excellent job of showing Roosevelt, the man, and how hard he worked to finally get to the Presidency. The book deeply covered the corruption of politics in D.C. and the country and the maneuvering that took place. It also showed how FDR could manipulate people. This book truly opened up politics as it was and is. In the newsreels he never showed his physical pain caused by the braces. In fact, the newsreels photographed him in such a way that most of us did not know how crippled he was. I never would have thought of him as being handsome because I saw him on the newsreels when he was older. The newspapers never revealed his extra-marital relationships and so that came as a shock years later to the public at large.

I truly commend his consideration of the people of Warm Springs, Georgia, which caused him to try to increase wages for the very poor, which the book hints he never realized until he had spent time in the rural areas. His developing the resort into a place for his comfort and then for the healing of other polio victims must have come from a facet of his inner being not exhibited before.

I saw the little white house at Warm Springs, which looked like a hunting cabin--very unpretentious. There was a bedroom adjacent to FDR, which was occupied by Missy LeHand who was his secretary and with him throughout the rest of his life. There was a movie shown at Warm Springs revealing that Eleanor did not like it and would not live there. In the beginning the roof leaked, wind whistled through the walls and it was too rugged for a city-bred woman. She also strenuously objected to FDR paying for it with the bulk of his inheritance.

No one can imagine the hardships of the years from 1930 to about 1942 for the American people. Rich and poor alike lost their money in the banks when the banks failed and could not pay off depositors. My parents lost their savings of $5,000, which in those days was about like $50,000 now. The failure of the banks left people destitute and starving. I didn't understand why he called in all of the gold from private citizens. Probably every type of catastrophe conceivable for a country to experience faced FDR. He was highly criticized for instituting the CCC's, which one ignorant talk show host compared it to slave labor. One man who worked in the CCCs said it was the only labor available to teenagers and kept them off of the street and starving. They got three good meals a day, a bed and $15 a month. That was more than he would have received in his household. Our great parks are a result of their labor. Families who were hungry sent their children to relatives to care for. The books by Steinback truly represent some of the horrors of those times because the dust bowl exaggerated the already collapse of much of American life. In the West, some of the family men who were on welfare later were hired by a government agency who built federal projects like Grand Coulee dam in Washington State.

During the war years, Roosevelt carried the weight of maintaining the morale of this country when so many young men were drafted to the military to go to a foreign country and probably be killed. It is obvious now that Roosevelt knew that at some time Japan would attack, but we were an isolationist country as the book shows and how difficult it was for him to help Churchill and Great Britain. I remember the newsreels showing ships carrying Lend Lease materials for England that later were sunk by German submarines. All of this was very frightening to us and Roosevelt's fireside chats helped maintain calm and determination in this country. He stirred up the civilians to deal with rationing of gas, food, sugar, the cumbersome ration cards and instilled in us children an energy to do our part by such measures as finding discarded scrap iron that could be reused for war time.

This man was a giant, which the book shows, yet also covers his mistakes and weaknesses. This book truly filled in the blanks for me and also added in a most interesting way the life of this man. I can truly recommend it for everyone who believes in this country.

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.

Seldom does one find an 800-page history text to be a "page turner", but this is such a book. Brands is a superb biographer; he organizes and tells the story of the first half of the 20th century in an absolutely fascinating way. One cannot help but recognize how little people and politics have changed -- the same greed and corruption among politicians and Wall Street, the same theme of conservative versus progressive politics and of government once again coming to the rescue of free-market capitalism. The similarities to the current economic and political situation require careful consideration by the reader.

Put this together with Behrman's "The Most Noble Adventure" regarding the Marshall Plan and you follow many of the same players into the next generation. Both books are written so well as to read like novels.

A great gift for anyone interested in history and/or politics.

Reading this superb biography of FDR was like reading a memoir of my time - because from the day I first heard his rich and melodious voice over the radio saying that " We have nothing to fear but fear itself" in his Inaugural Address in March 1933 and until in the far Pacific in April of 1945 I received word of his death he was not only an integral part of my life, he was an integral part of the life of every other American as well. So this biography was personal, even emotional, because it evoked the memories of those awful years of Depression and hardship and dread as he led us through the bad times, then through the lead-up to the War and then our four years of the War itself. Every American who lived through these times has been in some way marked for life; but it was up to someone as cool-headed as Professor Brands (who didn't experience these years) to write this great book, a book in which on pages 818 and 817 he writes the perfect summary of - the perfect epitaph to - the life of this extraordinary man.

It's all there in the 800 pages that precede this summary and epitaph; and I urge you to read them - all of them - because they tell the story exactly as I remember it from 1933 forward It's great - and accurate - historical writing, great story telling and worth the hours it may take to read it.

Some observations: the rich, imperious elite who surrounded and inhabited his life of privilege will impress you; and he was part of it - absolutely one of them. One spent the summer in Europe, sailing always first class - with a maid and maybe a manservant. There was always a staff of servants in the house - or houses as the case might be. And one always knew someone who knew someone else of the same class. One didn't stray far from the boundaries of the class. But Franklin Roosevelt did. He went into politics with the intent and design to be President; and his politics and his times required that the perceptions of his class as privileged be curtailed. Thus he "betrayed" his class. But Bands never dwells on it. It's just the fact that in his time FDR was excoriated by some with the same venom used against George W. Bush in our time - whether deserved or not.

Another observation: While Bands never dwells on it, there was something unusual about his personality. He never allowed anyone to get close to him except perhaps maybe Louis Howe and/or Harry Hopkins and maybe one or two of his children and certainly Lucy Mercer, the true love of his life. Brands handles this and his relationship or lack thereof with his wife Eleanor with consummate delicacy.

A final observation: Except for the nerves concerning sexual activity he was hopelessly paralyzed from the waist down as the result of his polio and lived for thirty years dependent on others for assistance. Yet there was never a word of complaint And those of us who admired him from afar were never really aware of the extent of his paralysis or the degree of his disability. He was a courageous upbeat man; and Brands does an excellent job handling g this subject with equal tact and delicacy.

Go read the book. It's a good one!

In the landscape of historical books there is a plethora of long gone forests expended in describing the life and times of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I have read two rather distinctive and thorough accounts of FDR being Conrad Black's "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Champion of Freedom" and Doris Kearns Goodwin's "No Ordinary Time". Both these books were outstanding works and gave excellent perspectives on FDR's life. However, what H.W. Brands has done is to answer the ultimate question of this privileged patrician born to the equivalence of "American Aristocracy". That rather simple journalistic question is "why". When using "why" in the context of why as a privileged son of American capitalism did he utilize the auspices of government to help all socio economic classes?
As stated by the Author, FDR was living the high structured and favored life of high class Americans in which he held legislative offices in New York State and later performed the duties of assistant navy secretary in the Wilson Administration. His goal was the ultimate prize for men of his social rank, that being the Presidency of the United States. His desire was to emulate and even surpass the accomplishments of his distant cousin Teddy Roosevelt.
Here's where Brands' take provides an interesting and divergent path. The Author goes into detail of why FDR became the "President for all the people". It was in 1921 that FDR contracted polio and life as he knew it changed not only for his life but in essence later for the lives of all Americans. While convalescing in rural Georgia at Warm Springs, FDR began to realize by firsthand knowledge how people lived lives constricted by limited economic resources. When FDR asked about poverty and was answered that low crop prices affected the whole economic scene he realized the first hand problems of ordinary people. The facts became apparent to FDR as to how people were manipulated by the upper economic classes. By living with and talking with the locals, FDR came to identify with the economic entrapments of the lower and middle classes. It's as if he received a cold slap in the face.
What Brands has done in this wonderful treatise is to give us the true founding of FDR's political philosophy. Brands spends 2/3 of the book expounding on the formation of this political philosophy onto the "New Deal" domestic policies. Later in the book, we get to know how FDR guided our country through the slippery slopes of isolationism and onward to being a world leader in World War II.
In all, Brands brings us closer to understanding FDR. In reality, FDR still remains an enigma. We understand him, we think, do we? This reminds me of the Cheshire cat in "Alice in Wonderland", now we see him, now we don't. Where is that cat??
Great insight! The cat gave it 10 Stars!!

H.W. Brands' Traitor to His Class, The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is the finest one volume biography of FDR. It eclipses Jean Edward Smith's recent entry on this well covered topic. What makes Brands' work superior is his research, his opinions and his balance.
Brands. "He (FDR) believed in democracy - in the capacity of ordinary Americans, exercising their collective judgment, to address the ills that afflicted their society. He refused to rely on the invisible hand of the marketplace, for the compelling reason that during his lifetime the invisible hand had wreaked very visible havoc on millions of unoffending Americans. He refused to accept that government invariably bungled whatever it attempted, and his refusal inspired government efforts that had a tremendous positive effect on millions of marginal farmers, furloughed workers, and struggling merchants . . . Did he get everything right? By no means, and he never claimed he did. But he got a great deal right. He caught the banking system in free fall and guided it to a soft landing. He sponsored rules that helped prevent a recurrence of the banking collapse and the stock market crash that preceded it".

While some might question that last sentence, it would be stretch to expect even a great man to have the foresight to see what markets would "innovate" sixty years after his death. His research is excellent, his writing within grasp of a non-scholar and is simply a highly informative and enjoyable historical read.

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)

Iv'e always been a little doubtful as to whether H.W.Brands is a great popular historian. The guy is a writing machine and his work touches every era of American history. However, Traitor to His Class resolves the issue. Not only is it the best biography of FDR, it is a better history of the depression and WWII than many acclaimed books in those fields. Some historians can't help but treat each event separately; Brands' treatment has a wholistic feel that never lets you forget the urgency of the sick economy or the rapacity of the Axis. The emphasis he imparts to various episodes strike me as both well measured and well said. There are no new insights, but there are observations from characters not usually quoted and excerpts from FDR speeches rarely heard.

This book is especially revealing at this point in time. As I write, the economy is retracting, a depression is feared and the Bush administration is fumbling its recessitation. Much of the current political commentary is a rehash from Herbert Hoover's time. Brands' book makes you realize how far starboard this nation has drifted in the last 40 years and how little we have learned from the past.

Traitor to His Class is the new biography by Dr. H.W. "Bill" Brands of the University of Texas. Brands is notable for such acclaimed previous biaographies of American historical giants Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin. His books are notable for being academically sound and written with a felicitous and easy to comprehend style.
There is little that is new to historians in this 800 page behemoth of a well researched biography. Brands divides his book into three major sections.
Part One deals with FDR's birth as a rich child of an old man James Roosevelt and his much younger wife Sarah Delano. James died while FDR was a young man. His mother Sarah was imperious and doting. Sarah made life difficult for FDR's wife Eleanor. Until she died in 1941 Sarah ruled at Hyde Park! FDR attended Groton and Harvard where he was popular. He briefly attended law school and launched a career in New York politics serving in the state senate in Albany. He served as assistant secretary of the US Navy in the Wilson administration during World War I being mentored by Josephus Daniels. FDR was a buoyant optimist person enjoying stamp collecting and sailing. He was a master politican assisted by such able helpers as Louis Howe, Harrp Hopkins, Averill Harriman and his faithful secretary Missy LeHand.
In 1921 he came down with polio which strengthend his charaacter and made a man of him. He had earlier served as the Vice-Presidential candidate with James Cox the Democratic party candidate for President who was defeated by Warren G. Harding in the campaing of 1920. FDR
was unfaithful to Eleanor having a long term liason with Lucy Mercer. Eleanor and Franklin's marriage produced several children: Anna, James,
FDR Jr and Elliot. The couple stayed together because of their mutual love of the children and FDR's career. Eleanor later developed lesbian relationships with Lorena Hicock and other women. She was more liberal than her spouse in the area of civil rights and feminist causes. Eleanor and FDR had affection for one another but lived basically separate lives.
II. After serving as a popular governor of New York FDR won the presidency over the hapless Herbert Hoover. In the first 100 days he began to lead America out of the Great Depression. Through such agencies and programs as NRA, AAA, CCC, FWP he helped the land recover from the horribl economic times. FDR did not conquer the Depression but he led America to better economic times. Due to him and his team such monumental legislation as Social Security and a GI Bill of Rights became law. Roosevelt helped Great Britain with Lend-Lease prior to World War II. He had difficulty battling isolationists The nation finally became a wartime ally of Great Britain following the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
III. This section deals with FDR's role as a world leader during World War II. Along with Churchill in Great Britain and Stalin in the USSR the Allies won decisive and unconditional victory over the Nazis and Japanese Empire. FDR made such key decisions as naming Eisenhower as Commander in Chief of Operation Overord planning and implementing D-Day and the invasion of Europe. He was also instrumental in getting the Manhatten Project going in our nation's quest to have an atomic bomb before Germany or Japan. The burdens of the war wore Roosevelt down and he died in Warm Springs in April, 1945 mourned by the United States and the world.
FDR was elected to four terms; was the first president to fly overseas in war and outdid his famous cousin and idol Teddy Roosevelt on the world stage.
Brands book is excellent and so was the man he decribes in detail! America hopes our new president Barack Obama can lead and inspire our people as did FDR the greatest president of the twentieth century!

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 the constitution of the court to suit his favor. In Brands' narrative, this failure to pack the Court begins the story of a manipulative President, one who had very little compunction uttering this campaign phrase: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars." Then put those voters on boats storming Omaha Beach. The result leaves this reader to believe that it's possible the world would be a better place if Wendell Willkie had won in 1940. Willkie would have gotten us in the war but possibly without casually interning Japanese-American citizens for the bargain.

Brands has written sixteen books on American Themes, all, it seems, in tacit preparation for Roosevelt's story. The biography reads as if Brands sifted through the accumulated research of his lifetime to create a full picture of the man. Bravo. Do not buy this book here, though. Buy it at your local bookstore.