Dictator or Democrat?

"To every man who cast an honest vote for Willkie" a mellow, flute-playing historian last week dedicated a book about Franklin Roosevelt. Called Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat,* the book has for its author Gerald White Johnson, a 51-year-old editorial writer of the Baltimore Evening Sun. For its object the book has the aim of reducing the mistrust which many of the 22,000,000 Americans who voted against Roosevelt have for their President.

Thrice a majority of the nation has voted Franklin Roosevelt the man who should be President of the U.S. But that thrice-repeated vote has not quieted the suspicions of those throughout the nation who have an uneasy feeling that Mr. Roosevelt, under cover of the emergency, is trying "to slip something over" on democracy--socialism, collectivism or regimentation.

Gerald Johnson analyzes the broad trends of the New Deal, bearing in mind the "impression, held by many men every whit as humane as Mr. Roosevelt, that the underlying purpose was to effect a change in the direction of American political development." Author Johnson goes on to see whether the New Deal is integrated with the natural development of the U.S. tradition. His conclusion: a resounding aye, regardless of Roosevelt's faults.

Johnson regards Roosevelt as at least "an unusual President," classes him with the strong liberals (Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt I, Wilson). Says he: each of these liberal Presidents has left the republic more firmly established than he found it. Roosevelt II, says Johnson, has done likewise by bolstering the economic welfare of the lower third of the nation, and substantially strengthening the national morale.

Johnson argues that each of the "successive lunges of the American people" has been in "the direction of more effective control by the bulk of the people" (away from the Founding Fathers' concept of a republic governed by "the best people"). The people, he says, elected the New Deal "to abolish the theoretical neutrality of the Government as between man and man and to convert it into an instrument in the hands of the masses to be used by them to promote their welfare."

Johnson writes: "In the whole Roosevelt record there is not a single great musician, painter, sculptor, or other artist, and not a single madman. No Roosevelt ever died as a martyr to some great cause, and none was ever shot in a quarrel over a trollop. Up to the eighth generation there is no conspicuous instance in which a Roosevelt ever refused to do his duty, and none in which one ever did much more than his duty. For 250 years the family record was remarkably clear of both scandal and glory." Suddenly out of the line appeared "not one but two of the most extraordinary men this country has ever produced" (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt). Author Johnson's observation: each career was profoundly affected by a physical affliction--one by asthma, the other by infantile paralysis.

His analysis of the President's boyhood, youth, political beginnings makes all previous biography of the President seem pedestrian. His passage on the effect of poliomyelitis on Mr. Roosevelt--that it made him "one of us"--is sinewy writing. dramatically effective and exceedingly plausible. Johnson's careful dissection of the Roosevelt Governorship of New York ("one of the most intricate and skillful games of cutthroat ever played in the United States") is also a masterly job.

Halfway through the New Deal, Author Johnson begins to skip. His handling of the attempt to pack the Supreme Court is feeble; he stays so close to "the broad trends" that he misses almost completely the fiscal bewilderment of the Administration, far underestimates the meaning of the President's struggles with Congress, cursorily tackles the 1938 purge attempts, and, by skipping the six-year struggle over the Neutrality Act, grapples in the last chapter with Mr. Roosevelt's foreign policy in a sort of vacuum.

These sins of omission lessen the weight of the book. The question: What sort of man is Franklin Roosevelt? is not yet clear enough to answer. Mr. Johnson's shrewd argument--that the President is not only a democrat, but a great one--may remove fears that many Americans hold about Mr. Roosevelt. But the fear that the President is leading the country into some kind of Socialism only time and Mr. Roosevelt himself can banish.

* Harper; $3

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