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FDR #3
FDR: The New Deal Years 1933-1937
The War President opens as Roosevelt has been re-elected to a third term and the United States is drifting toward a war that has already engulfed Europe. Roosevelt, as commander in chief, statesman, and politician, must navigate a delicate balance between helping those in Europe--while remaining mindful of the forces of isolation both in the Congress and the country--and protecting the gains of the New Deal, upon which he has spent so much of his prestige and power.
Kenneth S. Davis draws vivid depictions of the lives, characters, and temperaments of the military and political personalities so paramount to the history of the Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, and Hitler; Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur; Admiral Darlan, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles Lindbergh, William Allen White, Joseph Kennedy, Averell Harriman, Harry Tru-man, Robert Murphy, Sidney Hillman, William Knud-sen, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Henry Stimson, A. Philip Randolph, Wendell Willkie, and Henry Wallace.
The portrait of Henry Hopkins, who interacted with many of these personalities on behalf of Roosevelt, is woven into this history as the complex, interconnected relationship it was. Hopkins burnished the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt and eased the way for their interactions with Stalin.
Another set of characters central to Roosevelt's life and finely drawn by the author includes Eleanor Roo-sevelt, Sara Roosevelt, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Princess Martha of Norway, and Daisy Suckley.
Integral to this history as well are the Argentina Conference, the Atlantic Charter and the beginnings of the United Nations, the Moscow Conference, lend-lease, the story of the building of the atomic bomb, Hitler's Final Solution and how Roosevelt and the State Department reacted to it, Pearl Harbor and war with Japan, the planning of Torch, and the murder of Admiral Darlan. All these stories intersect with the economic and social problems facing Roosevelt at home as the United States mobilizes for war.
The lessons and concerns of 1940-1943 as dissected in this book are still relevant to the problems and concerns of our own time. A recurrent theme is Do people control technology, or does technology control people?
Kenneth Davis had the rare gift of writing history that reads with the immediacy of a novel; and though the outcome of this history is well known, the events and people depicted here keep the reader focused on an enthralling suspense story.
Kenneth S. Davis draws vivid depictions of the lives, characters, and temperaments of the military and political personalities so paramount to the history of the Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle, and Hitler; Generals Marshall, Eisenhower, and MacArthur; Admiral Darlan, Chiang Kai-shek, Charles Lindbergh, William Allen White, Joseph Kennedy, Averell Harriman, Harry Tru-man, Robert Murphy, Sidney Hillman, William Knud-sen, Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Henry Stimson, A. Philip Randolph, Wendell Willkie, and Henry Wallace.
The portrait of Henry Hopkins, who interacted with many of these personalities on behalf of Roosevelt, is woven into this history as the complex, interconnected relationship it was. Hopkins burnished the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt and eased the way for their interactions with Stalin.
Another set of characters central to Roosevelt's life and finely drawn by the author includes Eleanor Roo-sevelt, Sara Roosevelt, Missy LeHand, Grace Tully, Princess Martha of Norway, and Daisy Suckley.
Integral to this history as well are the Argentina Conference, the Atlantic Charter and the beginnings of the United Nations, the Moscow Conference, lend-lease, the story of the building of the atomic bomb, Hitler's Final Solution and how Roosevelt and the State Department reacted to it, Pearl Harbor and war with Japan, the planning of Torch, and the murder of Admiral Darlan. All these stories intersect with the economic and social problems facing Roosevelt at home as the United States mobilizes for war.
The lessons and concerns of 1940-1943 as dissected in this book are still relevant to the problems and concerns of our own time. A recurrent theme is Do people control technology, or does technology control people?
Kenneth Davis had the rare gift of writing history that reads with the immediacy of a novel; and though the outcome of this history is well known, the events and people depicted here keep the reader focused on an enthralling suspense story.
756 pages, Hardcover
First published September 12, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 1, 2018
I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through this book. At 676, it’s quite a slog, especially since it focuses more on the FDR’s presidency, rather than the man, unlike the first two books.
Closely examined is the New Deal, those who fought for it, and those who fought against it. An especial focus is on the machinations of Big Business, and all they did to keep the benefits of the New Deal from the common man. Sort of like today. Except we ended up with our own version of Huey Long. And that’s something of an insult to Long.
But that very detailed examination could get overwhelming at times, as the reader is inundated with names and dates, places and events. But, eventually, I was drawn into the struggle to better the lives of the American people which was those four years, and to the man who led it. I was left with a different vision of FDR, one much more complex, but still one of deep admiration.
Closely examined is the New Deal, those who fought for it, and those who fought against it. An especial focus is on the machinations of Big Business, and all they did to keep the benefits of the New Deal from the common man. Sort of like today. Except we ended up with our own version of Huey Long. And that’s something of an insult to Long.
But that very detailed examination could get overwhelming at times, as the reader is inundated with names and dates, places and events. But, eventually, I was drawn into the struggle to better the lives of the American people which was those four years, and to the man who led it. I was left with a different vision of FDR, one much more complex, but still one of deep admiration.
September 16, 2017
Barring the Civil War, in no four year period did American life change so much and so irrevocably as during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term in office. Between his inauguration and what he himself, at least for a time, described as the fulfillment of his "new deal for the American people," the federal government became involved in almost every aspect of daily life. It placed millions of unemployed people on relief, and then, after 1935, in the Works Progress Administration's labor gangs. It regulated what farmers could and could not grow and provided billions in incentive payments to encourage them to abide by its rulings. It took the nation off the gold standard, guaranteed bank deposits, and centralized money control in the Federal Reserve. It began old age and unemployment programs that would last for generations. It regulated stock sales and securities exchanges. It guaranteed union organizing. And it began a host of programs, from small rural homesteads to the massive corporatist National Recovery Administration, that did not outlast Roosevelt but that indelibly shaped life during those years.
One of the surprising finds in this book, however, is that only a portion of the New Deal came from Roosevelt himself. Roosevelt wanted farm programs, and securities regulation, but he hated the bank deposit insurance plan, and was only pushed into plans like the NRA by an aggressive Congress. He lamented the explosion of relief payments, passed an economy act to cut back on federal salaries and veterans payments, and initially fought against extending social security to old age payments. He refused to endorse Senator Richard Wagner's union organizing plan until it seemed guaranteed of passage, and so on. As Davis says, Roosevelt had the genius of accepting the inevitable and then taking credit for it. Even after he vetoed the veteran's bonus in 1936 and Congress overrode him, he bragged about the bonus in his campaign speeches. Roosevelt was at the center of the whirlwind of those years, but his genius consisted in keeping himself and his administration in that center as the storm moved, and then leaning ever so slightly in the direction he desired.
Kenneth Davis again tells his story well and adds wonderful portraits of the main actors. His sympathetic portrayal of Eleanor and Lorena Hicks's intense personal relationship, as well as the fraught bureaucratic battles of Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes, are especially noteworthy. Yet, Roosevelt himself, partially due to his chameleon nature, sometimes falls into the background. Also, in this, volume 3 of Kenneth Davis's 5 volume unfinished biography of FDR, some of the author's habits begin to grate. Again anything short of socialism is condemned as foolishness, and any New Deal measure that does not fully nationalize and direct national industry is deemed an obvious mistake. Double adverbs ("immensely intensely") and overwriting are rampant. Still, this may be one of the most complete and thorough New Deal portraits out there, and for that I'm still grateful.
One of the surprising finds in this book, however, is that only a portion of the New Deal came from Roosevelt himself. Roosevelt wanted farm programs, and securities regulation, but he hated the bank deposit insurance plan, and was only pushed into plans like the NRA by an aggressive Congress. He lamented the explosion of relief payments, passed an economy act to cut back on federal salaries and veterans payments, and initially fought against extending social security to old age payments. He refused to endorse Senator Richard Wagner's union organizing plan until it seemed guaranteed of passage, and so on. As Davis says, Roosevelt had the genius of accepting the inevitable and then taking credit for it. Even after he vetoed the veteran's bonus in 1936 and Congress overrode him, he bragged about the bonus in his campaign speeches. Roosevelt was at the center of the whirlwind of those years, but his genius consisted in keeping himself and his administration in that center as the storm moved, and then leaning ever so slightly in the direction he desired.
Kenneth Davis again tells his story well and adds wonderful portraits of the main actors. His sympathetic portrayal of Eleanor and Lorena Hicks's intense personal relationship, as well as the fraught bureaucratic battles of Harry Hopkins and Harold Ickes, are especially noteworthy. Yet, Roosevelt himself, partially due to his chameleon nature, sometimes falls into the background. Also, in this, volume 3 of Kenneth Davis's 5 volume unfinished biography of FDR, some of the author's habits begin to grate. Again anything short of socialism is condemned as foolishness, and any New Deal measure that does not fully nationalize and direct national industry is deemed an obvious mistake. Double adverbs ("immensely intensely") and overwriting are rampant. Still, this may be one of the most complete and thorough New Deal portraits out there, and for that I'm still grateful.
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February 14, 2013Another monster book. A detailed look at the politics and personalities behind the First and Second New Deals. There is more about Eleanor's personal life than Franklin's in this volume. I suppose the details of Franklin's personal life alluded to here are dealt with in earlier volumes. There are striking parallels between the Great Depression and our own era of the Second Great Depression, the severity of the latter mitigated by the reforms FDR instituted in the former. The Tea Party had its counterpart in the big business interests of the 30s, and the Fox network had its counterpart in the Hearst media empire.I wish Obama would be able to give a speech like FDR's October 31, 1936 Madison Square Garden reelection one. That's the kind of fighting spirit we need in this age of the dominance of multinational capital and the business veto over government policy.
November 15, 2016
I started reading FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937, by Kenneth S. Davis, with a month to go before the end of the 2016 election. I was mostly curious--having grown up in the Church of FDR--as to how such monumental institutions as FDIC and Social Security had been accomplished, because I sensed, despite the polls of the day, that the US might be on the verge of momentous change in the opposite direction. I finished the book a couple of days after the election and sat in disappointed wonderment that my sense was correct: the Trump election is an earthquake that has opened up important cracks in some of those monumental institutions.
Also, however, there is the sense that there is tremendous value in holding up a history like this as a corrective lens through which to view current events. All kinds of media--mainstream, social, and antisocial--are awash in the notion that the country has never been this divided, that people have never been subject to these kinds of false propaganda, that ideological purity is the only way forward.
So it is fascinating to read a history of a time when the country was indeed divided along similar lines as today, and even moreso. It was the Great Depression. The banks had failed. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed. To the sudden dislocations of economic catastrophe were added the sledgehammer, labor-saving disruptions of technology. The climate had created a Dust Bowl in the midwest.
The political response to this was, however, far different than in the early 21st century. Then, there was a widespread belief that government must save the capitalist system or else burgeoning popular unrest would overflow into Communism.
How should that happen? One of the fascinating stories in this book is that FDR himself did not have a plan, at all. He was himself something of a conservative, especially when it came to balancing the Federal budget (this is the dawn of Keynesian deficit financing). He was explicitly opposed to anything resembling the British dole for the unemployed.
But something must be done. The foundation was emotional. FDR exercised great personal leadership through the force of personality broadcast by radio to the heartland: do not fear; together we will find an answer. Finding the answer(s) meant assembling his famous "brains trust" of professors and intellectuals to come up with something--anything, almost--to see what would work. There was--as one who has been on too many committees to count--little agreement among a lot of these idea people. Sometimes FDR perversely assigned them to tasks that they personally opposed! And sometimes they came up with solutions that FDR himself opposed, but not so strongly that he would not agree to give it a try (FDIC--bank deposit insurance--was such an example).
As dire as the situation was, for so many people, there were those at the top who, insulated by their own wealth and class entitlement, hated FDR as a traitor to his own elite class. For anyone who thinks that 2016's animosity is worse than ever before, here is a historically-informed passage by Davis: "… [W]hatever its explanation, the hostility, the personal hatred, was a fact. A formidable fact. It matched in kind and intensity the fury which men of privilege and property focused upon Jefferson and Jackson in the early years of the Republic. And an ugly manifestation that spring was a rash of stories, allegedly 'funny,' certainly scurrilous, about Roosevelt's entail and physical incapacity, about toothy Eleanor's high-pitched 'do-gooding' among 'niggers' and unemployed miners and other worthless trash."
Furthermore there was the elite control of the levers of propaganda, "a growing force, impossible to ignore in political calculation, since its motivating emotion was being implemented by a large control over mass communications, by an abundance of money with which to finance political campaigns, and by powerful legislative lobbies." Davis characterizes this as a "formal declaration of war" by "the business community," among them the US Chamber of Commerce, whose 1935 convention heard its opening speaker describe FDR's "promises to do constructive things" as "attempts to Sovietize America."
[Quotes p. 505]
And this was the situation after the mid-term elections of 1934, in which the Democrats gained considerable majorities in both houses of Congress, a development that so encouraged presidential advisor Harry Hopkins that he enthused to his staff, "This is our hour! We've got to get everything we want--a works program, social security, wage and hours, everything--now or never." [p. 434]
Now or never. And that was with commanding majorities. One of the lessons of US history is that legislative accomplishments are extremely hard to come by, even with commanding majorities.
Pathbreaking legislation must be drafted in the teeth of internal competition and dissension, much less opposition from across the aisle, in the other chamber, or in the courts. Social security, when it came, was the result both of careful crafting by the committee assigned to write it and of careful management of the approval process, which included having to get it past the big guy's objections to anything that smacked of welfare.
Furthermore, a big part of the story is that the initial draft of the legislation is not, well, the whole story. John Commons, the Wisconsin professor influential among those who developed both workmen's compensation insurance and social security, "used to tell his college students that given a choice between imperfect legislation well administered and perfect legislation poorly administered, they should not hesitate to choose the former." Social Security, whose enduring success stands as a testimony to those who believe that government is capable of big solutions, apparently owes this success to the program's initial administrators, chief among them Arthur Altmeyer. Thanks to him, says Davis, "despite the enormous administrative complexities and myriad invitations to disaster presented by the act he had helped shape, sound patterns of procedure were soon established, along with policy precedents that would ever after be followed." [Quotes p. 524]
Another current issue that seems to echo a New Deal concern has to do with climate and the environment. It is ironic that, as overwhelming and manifold as our concerns should be on this issue in 2016, the prevailing political sense is to ignore it, whereas in the early 20th century--if we go back to include the other Roosevelt president in this theme--one of the important planks of progressive thinking was the belief that conservation was a national issue.
It is here that FDR's personality shines through--his love of nature and his religious feeling that it was God's handiwork that he was in some way responsible for. This was especially the case with soil conservation. Here is an extended passage from Davis on this subject:
"As he rode east toward Green Bay, where on the morrow [Aug. 9, 1934] he was to give the one speech on his cross-country tour that had definite political overtones, he had a vision of America that can be described in terms of an organismic watershed concept--the concept which the two Morgans and Lilienthal applied on a grand scale in TVA and which H. H. Bennett applied on a much smaller scale, with much more limited means, in each of his soil conservation demonstration projects. There was in Roosevelt's mind a vivid, though vaguely defined, sense of water, flowing water, as means and organizing principle of Union. The watershed became metaphor. It bespoke the unity of nature and the bitter wages of man's sinning against this unity. By the same token, it bespoke the natural necessity and the basis in nature for defining individual freedom as a cooperative enterprise in any truly civilized human society, especially one of advanced technology. The America it stood for would be possessed of that 'liberty of the community' based on the principles of natural resource conservation which a young Franklin Roosevelt, inspired by the example of Cousin Theodore, struggled so hard to describe two decades ago, a 'liberty' that did not destroy or even truly limit the 'liberty of the individual' but incorporated and validated and enhanced it." [pp. 392-3]
Thus, in 2016, one can only wonder, "What's the matter with Wisconsin?"
Also, however, there is the sense that there is tremendous value in holding up a history like this as a corrective lens through which to view current events. All kinds of media--mainstream, social, and antisocial--are awash in the notion that the country has never been this divided, that people have never been subject to these kinds of false propaganda, that ideological purity is the only way forward.
So it is fascinating to read a history of a time when the country was indeed divided along similar lines as today, and even moreso. It was the Great Depression. The banks had failed. A quarter of the workforce was unemployed. To the sudden dislocations of economic catastrophe were added the sledgehammer, labor-saving disruptions of technology. The climate had created a Dust Bowl in the midwest.
The political response to this was, however, far different than in the early 21st century. Then, there was a widespread belief that government must save the capitalist system or else burgeoning popular unrest would overflow into Communism.
How should that happen? One of the fascinating stories in this book is that FDR himself did not have a plan, at all. He was himself something of a conservative, especially when it came to balancing the Federal budget (this is the dawn of Keynesian deficit financing). He was explicitly opposed to anything resembling the British dole for the unemployed.
But something must be done. The foundation was emotional. FDR exercised great personal leadership through the force of personality broadcast by radio to the heartland: do not fear; together we will find an answer. Finding the answer(s) meant assembling his famous "brains trust" of professors and intellectuals to come up with something--anything, almost--to see what would work. There was--as one who has been on too many committees to count--little agreement among a lot of these idea people. Sometimes FDR perversely assigned them to tasks that they personally opposed! And sometimes they came up with solutions that FDR himself opposed, but not so strongly that he would not agree to give it a try (FDIC--bank deposit insurance--was such an example).
As dire as the situation was, for so many people, there were those at the top who, insulated by their own wealth and class entitlement, hated FDR as a traitor to his own elite class. For anyone who thinks that 2016's animosity is worse than ever before, here is a historically-informed passage by Davis: "… [W]hatever its explanation, the hostility, the personal hatred, was a fact. A formidable fact. It matched in kind and intensity the fury which men of privilege and property focused upon Jefferson and Jackson in the early years of the Republic. And an ugly manifestation that spring was a rash of stories, allegedly 'funny,' certainly scurrilous, about Roosevelt's entail and physical incapacity, about toothy Eleanor's high-pitched 'do-gooding' among 'niggers' and unemployed miners and other worthless trash."
Furthermore there was the elite control of the levers of propaganda, "a growing force, impossible to ignore in political calculation, since its motivating emotion was being implemented by a large control over mass communications, by an abundance of money with which to finance political campaigns, and by powerful legislative lobbies." Davis characterizes this as a "formal declaration of war" by "the business community," among them the US Chamber of Commerce, whose 1935 convention heard its opening speaker describe FDR's "promises to do constructive things" as "attempts to Sovietize America."
[Quotes p. 505]
And this was the situation after the mid-term elections of 1934, in which the Democrats gained considerable majorities in both houses of Congress, a development that so encouraged presidential advisor Harry Hopkins that he enthused to his staff, "This is our hour! We've got to get everything we want--a works program, social security, wage and hours, everything--now or never." [p. 434]
Now or never. And that was with commanding majorities. One of the lessons of US history is that legislative accomplishments are extremely hard to come by, even with commanding majorities.
Pathbreaking legislation must be drafted in the teeth of internal competition and dissension, much less opposition from across the aisle, in the other chamber, or in the courts. Social security, when it came, was the result both of careful crafting by the committee assigned to write it and of careful management of the approval process, which included having to get it past the big guy's objections to anything that smacked of welfare.
Furthermore, a big part of the story is that the initial draft of the legislation is not, well, the whole story. John Commons, the Wisconsin professor influential among those who developed both workmen's compensation insurance and social security, "used to tell his college students that given a choice between imperfect legislation well administered and perfect legislation poorly administered, they should not hesitate to choose the former." Social Security, whose enduring success stands as a testimony to those who believe that government is capable of big solutions, apparently owes this success to the program's initial administrators, chief among them Arthur Altmeyer. Thanks to him, says Davis, "despite the enormous administrative complexities and myriad invitations to disaster presented by the act he had helped shape, sound patterns of procedure were soon established, along with policy precedents that would ever after be followed." [Quotes p. 524]
Another current issue that seems to echo a New Deal concern has to do with climate and the environment. It is ironic that, as overwhelming and manifold as our concerns should be on this issue in 2016, the prevailing political sense is to ignore it, whereas in the early 20th century--if we go back to include the other Roosevelt president in this theme--one of the important planks of progressive thinking was the belief that conservation was a national issue.
It is here that FDR's personality shines through--his love of nature and his religious feeling that it was God's handiwork that he was in some way responsible for. This was especially the case with soil conservation. Here is an extended passage from Davis on this subject:
"As he rode east toward Green Bay, where on the morrow [Aug. 9, 1934] he was to give the one speech on his cross-country tour that had definite political overtones, he had a vision of America that can be described in terms of an organismic watershed concept--the concept which the two Morgans and Lilienthal applied on a grand scale in TVA and which H. H. Bennett applied on a much smaller scale, with much more limited means, in each of his soil conservation demonstration projects. There was in Roosevelt's mind a vivid, though vaguely defined, sense of water, flowing water, as means and organizing principle of Union. The watershed became metaphor. It bespoke the unity of nature and the bitter wages of man's sinning against this unity. By the same token, it bespoke the natural necessity and the basis in nature for defining individual freedom as a cooperative enterprise in any truly civilized human society, especially one of advanced technology. The America it stood for would be possessed of that 'liberty of the community' based on the principles of natural resource conservation which a young Franklin Roosevelt, inspired by the example of Cousin Theodore, struggled so hard to describe two decades ago, a 'liberty' that did not destroy or even truly limit the 'liberty of the individual' but incorporated and validated and enhanced it." [pp. 392-3]
Thus, in 2016, one can only wonder, "What's the matter with Wisconsin?"
August 25, 2020
In all transparency, I only read 135 pages I am sure this book would be a great reference for a thesis, but to just learn about the New Deal. It is too thick with unnecessary detail.
November 3, 2021
Middle parts very dry and overly tedious
February 16, 2013
Wow! What a book. I've read the first 3 volumes in this series and enjoyed them all. This volume tends to get bogged down in the daily details of the New Deal. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I realized after reading this book that the great liberal I've always pictured him to be is something of a myth. There were so many times Roosevelt could have pushed for deeper change but sided with big business and undermined unions ect. I'm going to take a break from this series for a while because its a bit exhausting. But I'll be back for more!
September 29, 2009
A detailed study of FDR's first term as president. Generally well-written and researched. Sometimes a little overwritten, but generally an exciting read. Much stronger on domestic policy than foreign relations.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews