The Definitive FDR
Page 65
Suddenly the President groaned. He pressed and rubbed his temple hard—then the great head fell back inert. Carried to his bed, he lived, breathing heavily but unconscious, for about four hours. He died at 4:35 P.M.; it was fourscore years almost to the day since Lincoln’s death.
The news sped to Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington, to Harry Truman, summoned suddenly to the White House from Capitol Hill, to Winston Churchill, who felt as if he had been struck a physical blow, to soldiers, sailors, and marines on far-off battle fronts. To four of these fighting men went a message from their mother: “He did his job to the end as he would want you to do.” At the Capitol building a young congressman, groping for words, spoke for his generation: “He was the only person I ever knew—anywhere—who was never afraid. God, how he could take it for us all.” Everywhere men and women wept, openly and without shame.
“All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River,” Roosevelt had said nine months before, and now at last he would return. Through the dark Southern night the funeral train moved slowly back to Washington. Marines and infantrymen escorted the black, flag-draped caisson through the streets of Washington, while a huge crowd stood silent and unmoving. There was a brief, simple service in the East Room of the White House; then the body was placed again on the funeral train, and Roosevelt for the last time traveled the old, familiar route along the Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line through Philadelphia and into Manhattan, then across Hell Gate bridge and up along the Hudson.
At the siding on the riverbank below the home, the coffin was moved from the train to a caisson drawn by six brown horses. There followed a lone horse, hooded, stirrups reversed and a sword hanging from the left stirrup—symbolic of a lost warrior. Marching in rigid columns of three at slow funeral cadence, the guard escorted the body up the steep winding road, through the dark woods, to the little plateau above. Behind the house, framed by the rose garden, were assembled the family and friends, old servants and retainers, and files of soldiers and sailors standing at rigid attention on the expanse of green grass.
A river breeze off the Hudson ruffled the trees above. A military band sounded the sad notes of its dirge. Muffled drums beat slowly and a bugler played the haunting notes of Taps as the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave. The warrior was home.
A NOTE ON THE STUDY OF POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
THE LAST FEW DECADES HAVE SEEN two important strides in the study of political leadership. In the first place, students of the subject have become more cautious in their attempt to find leadership potentials in an individual’s heredity, and they have turned increasingly to environmental factors that selectively shape the nature of leadership. Secondly, they have de-emphasized the once common notion that leadership embraces a constellation of universal, innate traits and have substantially agreed that leadership involves a reciprocal relationship between personality and culture and is specific to a given situation. Both these developments have shifted emphasis from the leader as such and have directed more attention to the context in which the leader operates.1
This progress in the study of leadership is all the more welcome in an era when democratic peoples seek to understand the difficulties and possibilities of political leadership both in order to handle social and economic problems and to meet certain psychological needs of the people.2 Unhappily, both the promising developments mentioned above have enormously increased the complexities involved in the study of leadership, especially in the political arena. This note seeks to describe some of those complexities and to suggest that facing up to them may nevertheless make possible better understanding of political leadership in a democratic society. The case of Franklin D. Roosevelt will be used to illustrate certain aspects of the matter.
I
Geneticists who have studied the matter agree that personality traits are not inherited in any simple or absolute sense. An individual’s life cannot be seen as an automatic unfolding through time of the product of innate determinants of personality existing at birth. Certain potentials and certain restrictions are inherited, and the nature of these potentials and restrictions is determined by the interaction of many genes. The genetic constitution sets limits to the development of personality, but a tremendous range of possibilities exists between these limits. Different genetic structures provide varying potentialities for such vital processes as muscular responsiveness, glandular activity, reflexes, level of energy. “Biological inheritance,” conclude Kluckhohn and Murray, “provides the stuff from which personality is fashioned and, as manifested in the physique at a given time-point, determines trends and sets limits within which variation is constrained.” 3
Even though genes and chromosomes are simply keys to a great variety of potentials, heredity cannot be written off. Roosevelt, for example, inherited a physique that was to enhance his personal appeal in a culture that esteems physical attractiveness.4 He inherited certain physical potentials that would contribute to what a doctor many years later called his “extraordinarily sensitive emotional mechanism.” 5 He inherited his sex—of no small importance in a society that on the whole tends to vest political power in its males. Another Roosevelt—Theodore—illustrates the influence of his (presumably) inherited asthmatic condition in the shaping of his political personality. Teased by other boys because of his weakness, he compensated for this and other humiliations by boxing, going west, leading his Rough Riders, wielding the Big Stick, shooting lions.
Aside from such obvious hereditary factors, however, the biographer’s search for meaningful hereditary influences must be conducted with great prudence. Not only are the biochemical complexities involved infinitely varied and extremely difficult to measure, but at the point of birth, and indeed even in the prenatal condition, the environment begins to play on the individual a stream of converging and blending forces that will cease only with his death. These environmental forces—always interacting with the subject—liberate certain genetic potentialities, block others, and remold still others in a process whose main nature may not be visible even to the close observer. The tendency of some students of political leaders to see their subjects inheriting such qualities as courage, caution, chivalry, gaiety, or even an interest in particular matters like religion or transportation, must be viewed with a large dose of skepticism.6
On the other hand, such circumspection does not mean that a political leader’s immediate forbears can be ignored. Aside from certain neural-muscular potentials that can be inherited, and along with the hereditary factors mentioned above, there is the different matter of heritage— those values, attitudes, and behavior patterns that are handed to a person by reason of his birth in a family that prizes and wishes to preserve them.7 An individual may “inherit” certain traits in this sense far more significantly and durably than could possibly be the case with certain genetic potentialities.
II
The relation between emerging personality and society or culture is variously described as circular, mutual, relational, reciprocal, interactive, mutually reinforcing, but the phenomenon described is the same: the selective stimulation and restriction of the individual’s potential by environmental forces that may themselves be affected by the personality, in a never-ending process of give-and-take.8 The implication of this pattern for the student of personality is that he cannot be content with analyzing only the culture on the one hand, or only the personality on the other, as abstract entities, but he must study the interplay between the two. The implication for the student of leadership is that he must note the impact of the leader on the environment as well as the reverse process, for by definition he is dealing with a personality of some influence—limited though it may be in some cases—on his context.9
Elaborate studies of leadership in primary groups have confirmed the existence of reciprocal relations between leaders and followers as discussed above.10 Difficulty arises in the attempt to move from relatively simple and limited situations to larger, more elaborate, and more sharply p
oliticized environments. Seligman, discussing experiments with different types of leadership in small groups, has expressed the point well: 11
… The democratic atmosphere of an experimental group is not the microcosm of a democratic society. Political life occurs for the most part in large, institutional types of organizations, in which contacts are secondary and of which rules and forms are more characteristic than they are of face-to-face groups. Moreover, leadership in politics is associated with emergent features of leadership to a greater extent than would be true in an experimentally imposed one.…
In analyzing political leadership in terms of the larger political environment, one must of course take into account a great variety of factors. In the United States, for example, the following are some of the elements that must be considered: the norms and values operative in the society; the organization of political power through parties, major socio-economic groups, and leadership both in various overtly political activities and in economic, communications, professional, religious, and other areas; the governmental system, with special attention to the diffusion of power between national and state governments and among the three branches of the national government; voting behavior, including non-voting, as manifested in the various election contests that the aspiring political leader must win; and the tensions, insecurities, expectations, passivity, and anomie or ennui among the electorate.
To say all this is, of course, to say that the analyst of any political leader must be an analyst of society; he must be historian, sociologist, social psychologist and anthropologist, as well as biographer in the usual sense. It is also to say, perhaps, that the study of leadership in large, fluid, heterogeneous societies is no job for mere mortals. On the other hand, putting more emphasis on the political environment, complex though that environment may be, permits a more realistic and potentially more rewarding approach because the analyst can deal with the observable, tangible, measurable elements in the matrix instead of limiting himself unduly to the subterranean, sometimes invisible, and perhaps unique elements of any one leader’s temperament.12
The leader-in-society approach suggests three other guidelines in the study of political leadership—guidelines that may delimit the range of that study even while recognizing the many variables involved:
1. The traditional and desirable attention to the shaping of personality in childhood must be complemented by attention to developments in late adolescence and indeed through adulthood. Any act performed in adulthood, Dollard has said, will have a network of references to environmental factors and internal impulses “along the whole length of the drive sequences.” The influence of parents, siblings, and school, vital though these may be, are altered by later phases of development, especially in the American context, with its changeability in time and space. Moreover, data on later personality development may be more reliable than data on childhood, because fuller and more impersonal documentation may be available in the former case.13
2. The environmental political factors that affect the leader’s personality should not be treated as inchoate and indistinguishable forces impinging on the emerging leader but in terms of that leader’s perception of their existence and of their relative importance. Because he is at the mercy of a conjunction of forces—in an election, perhaps, or at a convention—that he must assess long in advance, the effective political leader may be far more responsive to contextual elements, as he sizes them up, than, say, a general or industrialist may be. The study of leadership involves two tasks in this respect: it must seek to understand why the political leader assigns priorities to political influences (i.e., why a Franklin Roosevelt will deal with city bosses even at the expense of antagonizing civic reformers); it must also assess independently the leader’s success in setting up such priorities (i.e., whether Roosevelt actually strengthened his own leadership in the long run by dealing with city bosses).14
3. The concept of role-taking is of central importance in analyzing political leadership in a fluid, variegated society. Leaders must perceive and identify with so many norms, loyalties, and interests that they can achieve adjustment only by pseudointegration—“by compartmentalizing their personalities to fit different segments of their lives,” as Kluckhohn and Murray describe the process in discussing personality integration generally.15 Just as a diverse society does not simply mold individuals in one fixed form but compels them to enact specific roles, so a heterogeneous political environment requires the leader to turn from role to role as he deals with, and even identifies with, different groups. While role-taking is traditionally viewed as a device to enable the leader to present different faces to different publics in the time-honored fashion of the politician, it also is testimony to the influence of environmental factors that compel the leader to recognize their demands and expectations. Roosevelt is an excellent case in point. However, the analyst of an important political leader must try to differentiate the roles from the central core personality, to rank order them, and—no easy task—to see whether role-taking affects that core personality. A test of the more dominant or creative leader, as described below, is the extent to which his role-taking is a means of implementing a central purpose independent of those roles, or, contrariwise, is simply a means of defining and expressing his personality.16
III
This last observation may also serve as an introduction to a final comment. Role-taking, carried to its ultimate degree, implies finally the absence of leadership (aside from the purely ceremonial), for the leader-actor assumes as many roles as society in all its component parts demands, and in doing so he mirrors society rather than transforms it. The creative leader, on the other hand, stands somewhat apart from society and assumes roles (as conciliator, as party chief, as representative of the whole nation, as commander-in-chief, etc.) only as a tactical means of realizing his long-term strategic ends, and in the long run seeks to broaden the environmental limits within which he operates.17 Far from being a slave to a role system, the great leader, as Gerth and Mills suggest, may actually smash it and set up another system in which his roles are differently structured.18
How great are the potentialities of creative leadership in this sense? This question cannot be answered abstractly. In the American culture one can point to certain conditions or points in time when a leader, sure of his means and of his ends, can alter the parallelogram of contextual forces amid which he operates: for example, a situation where prevailing popular attitudes are widespread but are superficial and lack depth and stability and hence are open to change brought about by systematic efforts by the leader; or a situation where groups opposed to the leader’s goals are poorly organized and feebly led; or a crucial turning point confronting a society, when opposing forces are evenly balanced, and determined action by the leader may tip the scales; or a situation where the leader has the time and resources to shape a whole new alignment of power, including, for example, a reorganized and realigned party system; or a situation where possibilities exist of gaining popular acquiescence in the redefinition of a society’s norms because the changed norms are identified with a widely beloved leader.19
All this is by no means to try to revive the discredited idea that great leaders can freely make history or refashion society.20 On the contrary, it clearly accepts the limitations (as in part described above) on even the most creative leadership; moreover, it recognizes that the leader can bring about lasting change not by intervening sporadically and casually in the stream of events but only by altering, if he can, the channels in which the stream of events takes place. It focuses the attention of the student of leadership again on the interaction between the emerging leader and the many facets of his environment. And, in the case of the biographer, it permits him, if he wishes, to set up criteria of leadership by which his subject can be measured.
1 For a brief summary of the role of heredity, and especially of its interrelation with environmental factors, see Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray, Personality in Nature, Society, a
nd Culture (New York: Knopf, 1948), pp. 38-39. One of the best descriptions of the shift from the “traits” approach to the situationist approach is Alvin W. Gouldner (ed.), Studies in Leadership (New York: Harper, 1950), especially the Introduction; this treatment has the added merit of discussing the possibilities of generalization even in connection with the situationist approach.
2 On this latter point, see Sebastian de Grazia, The Political Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
3 Op. cit., p. 39. See also Emory S. Bogardus, Leaders and Leadership (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934); Gardner Murphy, Personality (New York: Harper, 1947); L. C. Dunn and Th. Dobzhansky, Heredity, Race, and Society (New York: New American Library, 1946).
4 See Murphy, op. cit., p. 517.
5 Letter, Dr. George Diaper to Dr. Robert W. Lovett, Sept. 24, 1921, quoted in John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 226.
6 See Alfred M. Tozzer, “Biography and Biology,” chapter 12 in Kluckhohn and Murray, op. cit. Tozzer lists trait after trait that some biographer has seen as inherited; but I think he goes too far in implying that parentage can be virtually ignored in assessing personality.
7 I am indebted to Herman Kahn for making a point of this element in interpreting Roosevelt. An excellent example of how Roosevelt’s heritage affected his political behavior is the dialogue between him and General Stilwell, as reported by the latter, concerning wartime relations with Chiang Kai-shek—a dialogue marked implicitly by Roosevelt’s certainty of his own understanding of the Chinese because of his grandfather’s financial activity in China; see Joseph W. Stilwell, The Stilwell Papers (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), pp. 251-254.