FDRs Mentors

“FDR, as Gerhardt shows, was certainly one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, but consequential and greatness are not the same thing.”

UNC-Chapel Hill Professor of Jurisprudence Michael J. Gerhardt is an unabashed progressive who like other progressives believes Franklin D. Roosevelt was a “great” president. FDR vastly expanded the role of the presidency and the federal government in American life with his New Deal programs and his leadership during the Second World War. FDR, as Gerhardt shows, was certainly one of the most consequential presidents in our nation’s history, but consequential and greatness are not the same thing. Greatness is in the eye of the beholder.

Gerhardt’s new book FDR’s Mentors traces Roosevelt’s “greatness” in part to his “mentors,” who included, according to Gerhardt; his Groton School headmaster Endicott Peabody; his cousin and predecessor Theodore Roosevelt; President Woodrow Wilson whom he served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy; his fellow New York politician Al Smith; law professor and later Justice Felix Frankfurter; his political aid Louis Howe; his Labor Secretary Frances Perkins; his friend and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau; British Prime Minister Winston Churchill; and his wife Eleanor Roosevelt.

The progressive political world view championed by Gerhardt holds that the coercive powers of government should be used by political leaders to better the lives of the nation’s citizens, especially the less fortunate among us. FDR certainly tried to do that during the Great Depression with some success. But as Milton Friedman often noted, and Amity Schlaes demonstrates in her book The Forgotten Man, FDR’s New Deal policies did not end the economic crisis, they deepened and lengthened it.

Gerhardt calls FDR a progressive, but ideology and political philosophy always took a back seat to political power for FDR. Franklin Roosevelt always put politics first, as even his longest serving advisers like Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, Harry Hopkins, and Henry Wallace acknowledged.

FDR, as Gerhardt notes, refused to lead in the area of civil rights—even refusing to publicly support anti-lynching legislation—for fear of offending his southern supporters. Likewise, FDR refused to do anything substantive to save Jewish refugees before (and to a large extent during) World War II because he feared isolationist and anti-immigration voter sentiment.

Gerhardt mentions several times in the book that as World War II approached, the United States was ill-prepared for the global conflict that ensued, yet he never blames FDR for that unpreparedness. FDR, as Gerhardt admits, saw the gathering storm in Europe and Asia, but for political reasons he refused to place the U.S. on a war footing, promising Americans as late as November 1940 that their sons would not be fighting in foreign wars. He knew better, but staying in power was his first priority.

FDR deserves the plaudits that Gerhardt gives him for selecting military leaders like George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur (whom FDR once called the most dangerous man in America), Dwight Eisenhower, Henry “Hap” Arnold, Ernest King, Chester Nimitz, and others to lead the war effort. That, of course, had nothing to do with being progressive. FDR recognized the talents of these men and let them do their jobs.

FDR’s wartime diplomacy, which Gerhardt also applauds, is another matter. Gerhardt writes that FDR’s diplomatic strategy at the wartime conferences was to “keep Churchill and Stalin off balance,” but FDR repeatedly sided with Stalin against Churchill at these meetings. Robert Nisbet persuasively argued that FDR engaged in a “failed courtship” of Stalin, which led to missed opportunities to limit Soviet gains at the end of the war and to disputes that formed the basis of the emerging Cold War.

And there was nothing “progressive” or “great” about FDR’s infamous Executive Order 9066, which after Pearl Harbor forcibly removed people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast without due process and without any specific evidence of disloyalty. Gerhardt lays most of the blame for this on Gen. John DeWitt and the Roberts Commission who convinced FDR that our nation’s security required such a move.

One aspect of FDR’s “greatness” that Gerhardt fails to even mention is the carelessness with which his administration enabled Stalin’s agents to infiltrate his government. Historians and scholars have presented compelling evidence that Harry Dexter White, the number two man at Treasury, was a Soviet agent of influence; that Lauchlin Currie, who served on FDR’s White House staff, was a Soviet agent; that Alger Hiss, who accompanied FDR to the Yalta Conference, was working for Stalin. And there were many others. (Interestingly, Gerhardt writes that as late as 1944 “no one” suspected Hiss of being a Soviet spy, yet Hiss’s Soviet ties were brought to FDR’s attention in 1939 by Adolph Berle and in 1942 by J. Edgar Hoover).

Gerhardt to his credit acknowledges the lies, deceitfulness, and political manipulation that were a significant part of Roosevelt’s character. He lied to his wife and to his aides. He deceived his advisers and the public, including about his failing and sometimes debilitating health problems. He abused his powers by using the IRS against his political opponents. But all is forgiven at the altar of progressivism.

For far too long liberal or “progressive” historians, scholars, and the media have indoctrinated students and the public about the “greatness” of Franklin Roosevelt. Gerhardt’s book is just another conventional progressive biography of our nation’s 32nd president, using FDR’s mostly progressive “mentors” that supposedly helped him achieve “greatness.” An objective, i.e., non-progressive, assessment of FDR’s presidency, however, would show that his mentors helped him navigate a path to power, but not to greatness.