The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  The College Kid and the Tammany Beast. Warren Moscow, Politics in the Empire State (Knopf, 1948), a journalistic but judicious treatment of parties, politicians, and voters in New York, is a helpful book for understanding the general context in which FDR operated, although it focuses on the 1930’s and 1940’s. For New York machine politics see Gosnell1, M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), a lively and detailed historical account; Roy V. Peel, The Political Clubs of New York City (Putnam, 1935), an important study of the group relations within Tammany; and William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (Knopf, 1948). On the Sheehan fight, Lindley1 (B), Freidel (B), and Rollins have exceptionally full treatments; see also Langdon P. Marvin, OHP. FDRL (Group 9) contains hundreds of letters to FDR from constituents, and many of FDR’s replies, and several nuggets, including a copy of Boss Barnes’s letter to his legislative leaders outlining strategy, and the pro-Sheehan petition from Poughkeepsie with 265 names—“many in the same writing,” Senator Roosevelt said on receiving it.

  Farmer-Labor Representative. On Roosevelt’s senatorship in general, the most disappointing source is his own diary, in FDRL, which he kept brilliantly for the first three days of January 1911 and then abandoned. A sympathetic and balanced account of the Howe-Roosevelt relationship, by one of Howe’s assistants, can be found in Stiles (B). FDRL has (Group 9) hundreds of files of state senatorial papers; this luxuriant mass of material has been well indexed in a “Descriptive Inventory,” a typed document compiled by Carl L. Spicer and Kathryn C. Fell, FDRL, 1948. FDR’s correspondence files relating to bills and other legislative matters are arranged under about thirty-five subject classes of legislation; other matter is organized in “general subject files” and “name files.” Some of the most useful files (all in Group 9) are Nos. 15, “Postmaster Endorsements”; 35, “Labor Bills”; 16 (patronage), 309 (Sheehan), and 323 (Stetson). See also F. Perkins (B), although Miss Perkins underestimates, I believe, the extent to which FDR moved toward socio-economic progressivism during his senatorial days.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), ends with an exciting and detailed account of Wilson’s nomination and election campaigns. For T.R.’s role in the 1910-1912 period see George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1946), and for Taft’s, Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (2 vols., Farrar & Rinehart, 1939). The story of Daniels’ selection of FDR as assistant secretary is found in Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Roosevelt’s role in the Wilson Conference and the Empire State Democracy is meticulously covered in Rollins [chap. 2]. Roosevelt’s visit to Wilson, described on page 49 above, is not documented as fully and reliably as one might wish.

  A Roosevelt on the Job. Freidel’s account (B) of Roosevelt’s navy years (Vol. I covers the period through the Armistice) is detailed and perceptive. The Roosevelt-Daniels relationship is reflected in their letters to each other in Carroll Kilpatrick (ed.), Roosevelt and Daniels (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1952); the reflection is necessarily partial, but there is a discriminating introduction by the editor; see also Josephus Daniels Papers, LC. Even more useful on the two men is the sensitive, nostalgic treatment by the navy secretary’s son Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1954). The Letters are rather sparse during the prewar years. FDR’s own account of his wage-fixing activities in PPA (Vol. I, p. 60) is not wholly reliable. FDRL (Group 10) contains twenty-five boxes of letters and other material covering the navy period up to August 1914. The description on page 50 of bureaucracy is from C. Wright Mills’s brilliant White Collar (Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 263.

  Tammany Wins Again. Material on the 1914 race in FDRL is divided between “Personal Papers” and Correspondence—1914 senatorial race; the three boxes of the latter offer a wealth of fascinating letters and memorandums, including letters from Howe to Roosevelt while the latter was at Campobello in August 1914. Harold F. Gosnell (B, Gosnell2) quotes some of the documents relating to the 1914 fight, and I am indebted to him in assessing what Roosevelt learned from his defeat.

  War Leader. Roosevelt’s own accounts later of his war experiences must be used with great care; he liked to embroider. Material in PLFDR tends to be rather fragmentary (except during summers, when he was writing frequent letters to Eleanor at Campobello); it does include, however, Roosevelt’s highly factual diary that he carefully kept on his trip to Europe. FDRL has separate boxes on Roosevelt’s correspondence with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Admiral Mahan during the navy period. There is one box on the 1918 political events. Freidel (B) provides the most exhaustive and objective study of Roosevelt’s naval activities during the war. Roosevelt’s image of himself as a red-tape slasher is reflected in Roosevelt to Bernard Baruch, July 21, 1937, PSF, FDRL; that at least one of his associates concurred in this picture is evident from PLFDR, Vol. II, picture facing p. 157. I am indebted to Felix Frankfurter (interview, Washington, D. C, December 19, 1955) for his views and information on Roosevelt’s high capacities in his navy office. Data on Roosevelt’s request for membership in the American Legion can be found in PPF 4818, FDRL.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Physical changes in Roosevelt during the war years are well described in Gunther2 (B) and vividly depicted in Stefan Lorant, FDR: A Pictorial Biography (Simon and Schuster, 1950); domestic aspects of these years are reported in Eleanor Roosevelt2 (B), and in PL. His role as the young executive type is reflected in his speeches in FDRL, “Master File of Speeches,” and in Donald Day, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Own Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951), an admirable collection of selections from FDR’s private and public papers covering the period 1910-1945.

  Challenge and Response. Accounts of the League of Nations struggle are many and varied. I have relied mainly on D. F. Fleming’s authoritative The United States and the League of Nations (Putnam, 1932), which stresses the fight in the Senate and quotes extensively from debates; Thomas A. Bailey, Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace (Macmillan, 1944), an acute work that focuses on decisions in Paris and includes a long bibliography; and James M. Cox’s garrulous, good-humored Journey Through My Years (Simon and Schuster, 1946), important in this connection mainly for the 1920 campaign. Roosevelt’s speeches during the period are well indexed and summarized in the published Calendar of Speeches, and in an unpublished “Calendar of the Speeches and Other Published Statements of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Campaign of 1920,” FDRL, compiled by Robert L. Jacoby. The observer quoted on page 68 is William Bolitho.

  1920—The Solemn Referendum. Chief sources for the 1920 campaign are Cox, and Lindley1 (B), the New York Times, and the following in FDRL: a collection of unpublished speeches and public statements of Roosevelt during the campaign; and Group 15, which includes twenty-six boxes of correspondence and other materials containing campaign correspondence collected at the Roosevelt headquarters in New York City, papers relating to the Democratic National Convention, and an alphabetical file of general correspondence with political figures and friends, as well as five boxes of newspaper clippings, four scrapbooks, and several boxes of campaign literature. Many accounts of the meeting of Cox and Roosevelt are inaccurate; I have relied mainly on Cox, pp. 241 ff., and PL, Vol. II, pp. 496-497. Roosevelt’s vice-presidential acceptance speech—perhaps his most significant during these years—is reported in full in PL, Vol. II, pp. 500-508. Marvin interview, OHP, is source for the statement that Roosevelt was cautiously optimistic on the eve of the 1920 election.

  The Rising Politician. The episode described on pp. 76-77 above is based wholly on internal evidence in Sara Delano Roosevelt’s letter to Roosevelt, October 14, 1917, PL, Vol. 1905-1928, pp. 274-275, although it also fits the general pattern of the family relationship at that time. Eleanor Roosevelt (interview, July 28, 1955)
has commented on Roosevelt’s slight feeling of alienation at Groton and Harvard despite his general adaptability. In interpreting Roosevelt’s personality development my hypothesis is that biological and environmental forces represent not opposites but a continuum in which the forces are mutually interdependent and interactive. See Walter C. Langer, Psychology and Human Living (Appleton-Century, 1943); Ralph Linton [chap. 1]; Gardner Murphy, Personality (Harper, 1947); John W. Bennett and Melvin M. Tumin, Social Life (Knopf, 1949); Theodore M. Newcomb, Social Psychology (Dryden Press, 1950); Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (W. W. Norton, 1937); Abram Kardiner and others, The Psychological Frontiers of Society (Columbia University Press, 1945). Alfred M. Tozzer, “Biography and Biology,” American Anthropologist, Vol. XXXV, 1933, pp. 418-432, is a good-natured but devastating critique of attempts of biographers to specify the ancestral origin of particular qualities in their subjects.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The best retrospective portrait of the 1920’s is still Frederick L. Allen, Only Yesterday (Harper, 1931). For political aspects of the era see Karl Schriftgiesser, This Was Normalcy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948); for economic, Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (2 vols., McGraw-Hill, 1929); for sociological, Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (Harcourt, Brace, 1937); and for a wry look backward from the perspective of the 1930’s, chap. 1 of Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, America in Midpassage (Macmillan, 1939). William Allen White’s biography of Coolidge, A Puritan in Babylon (Macmillan, 1938) draws a marvelous contrast between the flint-faced president and the self-indulgent America around him. Freidel (B), Vol. II, contains a full and balanced account of Roosevelt’s business activities; see also John T. Flynn (B) and Alva Johnston, “Mr. Roosevelt as a Businessman,” Saturday Evening Post, October 31, 1936. James W. Prothro, “The Political Theory of American Business” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1952), is a sharp and deep-probing analysis of business attitudes m the United States. I read this in thesis form but it has since been published as The Dollar Decade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954).

  Ordeal. Roosevelt’s political life in the 1920-28 period is hard to analyze fully because his illness limited him in activities, such as political speeches and formal messages, that ordinarily result in important documents. Gunther2 (B) has the most illuminating description of the nature and effects of his illness and quotes previously unpublished medical diagnoses and observations. Turnley Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story (A. A. Wyn, 1953) is a delightful account of that phase. Some who knew Roosevelt well believe that polio had a more lasting impact on his personality than I do; see, for example, Perkins (B), chap. 3; (for Harry Hopkins’ views on the matter) Ickes2, p. 225; Daniels to George Creel, November 12, 1947, Daniels Papers, LC. Letters in PLFDR and in FDRL show how quickly Roosevelt picked up the threads of his political life following his illness. These are organized alphabetically in Group 11, Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1920-1928. A box of miscellaneous data in Group 14, FDRL, includes first pages of Roosevelt’s two abortive works, his submission for the Bok peace prize, his newspaper columns, Milton School speech, and other items. Day [chap. 4] is especially useful for the 1920’s.

  Dear Al and Dear Frank. A full life of Al Smith is needed. His Up to Now (Viking, 1929), is good reading; so is Henry F. Pringle, Alfred E. Smith (Macy-Masius, 1927), which is essentially a high-class campaign biography by an admirer but contains important insights. Neither of these includes Smith’s significant post-1928 years, nor is there much mention of Roosevelt. FDRL has a useful file of correspondence between Smith and Roosevelt. Louis B. Wehle, Hidden Threads of History (Macmillan, 1953) contains several letters from Roosevelt indicating something of the latter’s political plans in the 1920’s. “General Correspondence,” Campaign of 1920, twenty-eight boxes (Group 15), and “General Political Correspondence” (Group 11), alphabetically organized (nine boxes), comprise thirty-seven boxes of political correspondence of Roosevelt, 1920-1928; some are useful, most of the Group 15 letters are congratulations with brief replies. Correspondence with Howe, Oldfield, Van Lear Black, Hull, Jones, and other political or personal friends are of particular value. Rollins [chap. 2] is especially rewarding for the period of the 1920’s, as is Freidel’s broad-gaged study (B). Answers to Roosevelt’s letters on party reorganization are filed separately in Group 11, but they have not been digested for 1924. “1924 Campaign Correspondence” (Group 11) in FDRL consists mostly of letters from Smith supporters with brief acknowledgments from Roosevelt or Smith, but this file with subheading “Democratic National Committee” has elaborate records on delegate sympathies, political conditions in the states, and the like.

  Summons to Action. Roosevelt’s weighing of political choices is described in a memorandum by Gustavus A. Rogers in his papers at FDRL, Box 4, Group 31. The drafting of Roosevelt in 1928 has been described with substantial accuracy in Eleanor Roosevelt1 (B), a candid account of the 1928-1945 years; Edward J. Flynn (B), a temperate, knowledgeable chronicle by the head of the Democratic machine in the Bronx who joined Roosevelt’s forces in 1928; Farley1 (B), a revealing story but overfriendly to Roosevelt; and in Lindley1 (B). These accounts of the draft are substantiated in Howe’s telegrams to Roosevelt in Howe file, FDRL, and “1928 Campaign Correspondence,” Group 17, FDRL, especially Roosevelt’s letter to Frederic Delano, October 8, 1928. Rollins on the 1928 draft is especially revealing. Farley’s impression that Roosevelt was Smith’s third choice for governor (after Lehman and one other) is not borne out in other memoirs or in documents. On the 1928 campaign the most informative material is in Rosenman (B); Perkins (B), Edward J. Flynn (B), and Lindley1 (B) provide intriguing glimpses of the campaign, especially election night. Material in FDRL on the campaign is rather limited; the collection of typewritten copies of Roosevelt’s campaign speeches in FDRL, however, covers the campaign far more fully than the excerpts that mark the beginning of Vol. I (1928-1932) of PPA. Gosnell2 (B) and Moscow (B) offer some analysis of the 1928 election results. For the over-all picture of the 1928 presidential campaign see Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly, The 1928 Campaign (Richard R. Smith, 1931). Roosevelt’s feeling that he was excluded from the inner councils of Smith’s presidential campaign is reflected in PLFDR, Vol. II, p. 772, memorandum of April 6, 1938.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lindley1 (B), Perkins (B), Edward J. Flynn (B), and Rosenman (B) agree on the main aspects of the Smith-Roosevelt relationship; it is unfortunate that more data is not available on the situation from Smith’s point of view. PLFDR shows that the two men dealt with each other in an apparently friendly spirit during the first two or three gubernatorial years. Roosevelt wrote “for the record” in April 1938 (PLFDR, pp. 771-773) a brief memoir on Smith’s expectations of guiding Roosevelt during the latter’s first months in office. The Lindley quotation is from Lindley1 (B), pp. 339-340.

  The Politics of the Empire State. Moscow (B) is an informed, balanced treatment of the subject; I have relied on it heavily and borrowed from its title. Belle Zeller, Pressure Politics in New York (Prentice-Hall, 1937) treats in detail the complex strands of influence in the legislature. Gunther1 has a brief but suggestive section on the state. FDRL has on permanent loan from the Office of the Governor of New York State, Albany, files on the controversy over the executive budget, containing mainly official reports and some correspondence, including a number of interesting letters between Roosevelt and his counsel. A. E. Buck, “The Budget Fight in New York,” National Municipal Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 5, May 1929, pp. 352-354, is a succinct review that indicates Roosevelt did not monopolize virtue in the fight. PPAFDR includes a statement and a speech on the subject. One of the most fruitful sources for the gubernatorial period is Roosevelt’s voluminous “Personal Correspondence, 1928-32,” Group 12, organized alphabetically. Most of the invaluable correspondence with Howe is found separately in the Howe Papers, Group 36. A small fraction of the personal correspondence i
s available in PLFDR.

  The Anatomy of Stalemate. Useful secondary material on the gubernatorial years is limited, partly because this period pales next to the succeeding one, partly because Roosevelt’s own activities during the latter period shade off into the presidential contests. Lindley1 (B) is the fullest source; while it was written midway through Roosevelt’s governorship, it gains from the fact that the author was a reporter in Albany during these years and had a shrewd journalistic eye. While the book is favorable to Roosevelt, letters in FDRL and PLFDR indicate that Lindley could be critical. The four volumes of gubernatorial papers of FDR (Albany: J. B. Lyon Co., 1930-39) are the fullest source and contain messages to the legislature, speeches, etc. PPAFDR, Vol. I, offers numerous messages, reports, and speeches on the St. Lawrence; it covers to a lesser or greater extent all the main policies of the administration, with revealing introductory notes by Roosevelt. The New York State files on loan to FDRL contain filing drawers of legislative matter, departmental reports, and other documents, and occasional letters, in each of the major subject areas. A full description of Roosevelt’s major projects and programs is found in Bernard Bellush, “Apprenticeship for the Presidency: Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1950), published as Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York (Columbia University Press, 1955), which makes use of both the official documents and the personal correspondence.