by H. W. Brands

In Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life And Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H. W. 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.

As Brands explains, Roosevelt had help. The sensibilities of Victorian America worked to Roosevelt’s benefit, and this 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. In short, God and Government belonged to Republican WASPs. These upright elites had routed the South during the Civil War and spent the next few generations lording it over the nation. They combined “nearly all 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.”

Roosevelt’s’ set comprised the small group of good Republican Episcopalians who seemed to run the world. They had names like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ellery Sedgwick, Breckinridge Long, and Endicott Peabody— an appellation that can now only give itself to someone very white, or someone very, very black. The 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, boarding schools like Groton 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. 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,” Brand writes.

In this wide-ranging work, Brands digs through a trove of diaries and notes to construct an image of 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; of the loyal and canny Louise Howe; plucky, do-gooding Harry Hopkins, and the straight-talking Wendell Willkie. He colors portraits of Francis Townsend, the retired doctor who begat Social Security; John Lewis, the famed and troublesome labor agitator; Walter Lippman, a journalist working in eloquent opposition to Roosevelt’s endeavors; of the frenetic populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long, a force of blustering nature who seemed more a hurricane than a man; and the terrifying phenomenon of Douglas MacArthur.
The author 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 into a crafty Washington pol who strung out Stalin for three years before finally engaging in World War II. One knows Brands’ portrayal cuts a compelling figure when even Joseph Stalin emerges a sympathetic figure. The President weaseled Stalin into accepting his roles as “to keep Hitler occupied and to kill Germans—lots and lots of Germans. Every German who died on the eastern front was one fewer the Americans and British would have to fight themselves, when their turn came.”

The author’s work as an academic betrays a keen eye for historical balance he energetically blends Roosevelt’s monumental feats of political labor, like emancipating the American dollar from the gold standard, with more antiquarian concerns, Roosevelt’s dalliances and infidelities, showing that it’s always disappointing when the good are not faithful. In addition, Brands shades an over-arching, critical view of Roosevelt’s political priorities, especially concerning the New Deal’s efficacy in ending the Great Depression and the casual internment of Japanese Americans.

Brands has written sixteen books on American themes, from his Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Andrew Jackson to The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War. All of this previous work seems in tacit preparation for Roosevelt’s story. Traitor to His Class reads as if Brands sifted through the accumulated research of his lifetime to create a full and satisfying picture of this one man. Bravo.

Reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life And Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands
Doubleday Books, 2008
Cloth, 896 pp, $35.00
ISBN-10: 0385519583