Titan in Training

By Laurence I. Barrett

F.D.R.: THE BECKONING OF DESTINY, 1882 TO 1928 by KENNETH S. DAVIS 936 pages. Putnam. $15.

The expectant father, James, middle-aged and anxious, was so grateful when things turned out well that he responded to the doctor's bill for $82 with a payment of $100. The Hudson River, Hyde Park, Democratic Roosevelts--as opposed to the Long Island Republican Roosevelts--were of course friends of that fellow New Yorker in the White House, Grover Cleveland. They sent a Dutch antique clock on the occasion of his marriage, and later, when their $100 baby was five, James and Sara took him to the White House to meet the Chief Executive. Cleveland, having his troubles, said to Franklin: "Little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President."

Within a few years, Franklin, of course, consciously set out to defy that admonition. One of the remote results was this leviathan of a volume. Roosevelt literature is reaching Talmudic proportions, and the prospective reader is entitled to be skeptical. But Kenneth S. Davis is a skillful journalist, novelist, historian and biographer (Eisenhower, Stevenson, Lindbergh). What is more important, he has something to say.

Frail Humanity. The most familiar recent histories and F.D.R. biographies, like James MacGregor Burns', concentrate on the successive crises of the Depression and World War II: Roosevelt, the embattled titan, fighting for the presidency, then for economic reform, finally for democracy's very survival. Davis ends this volume in the fall of 1928, with Roosevelt about to be nominated for Governor of New York. He assesses Roosevelt not as a hero but as a man full of frail humanity.

The President to be was a pampered child who was not allowed to bathe alone until he was eight. At Harvard he was a mediocre student and rather shy with women. He did get the top editorial job at the Crimson in 1903, but that success was shadowed. Earlier he had received credit for a Crimson scoop that disclosed how Harvard's President Eliot would vote (Republican) in the 1900 national election. The information for that exclusive, as Roosevelt confessed years later, had really been obtained by a classmate.

Davis follows his man step by step through law school and into a job as law clerk with the prestigious New York City law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. Young Roosevelt soon began telling fellow law clerks that he planned to follow in Cousin Theodore's footsteps. The first step was a seemingly hopeless contest for the state senate. But F.D.R. won as a progressive Democrat --thanks largely to the gusto of his campaign--and immediately plunged into a dangerous scrap with Boss Murphy's Tammany Hall over the selection of a U.S. Senator. Some of the book's best passages relate intricate New York politicking, with reformers pitted--as they still are today--against regulars. As a freshman state senator, Franklin often stood bravely on his principles--but wavered on other occasions when he sensed the possibility of serious political damage. He was still very much the country-squire Jeffersonian, rather slow to understand the problems of the urban workers as Fellow Democrats Al Smith, Robert Wagner and Frances Perkins did. But he worked, he learned and he grew.

Inability. The two pre-eminent influences on the U.S. during this period were conflict over political-economical reform and rapid technological advances. A theme that runs throughout the book, and will presumably be picked up and expanded in the second volume that Davis plans, is the inability of political leaders to comprehend changing technology, either in peace or war. The World War I Administration--Roosevelt served as a brash, energetic Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels--accumulated vast powers but used them clumsily and often brutally, violating many of the progressive principles that Woodrow Wilson, Daniels and Roosevelt professed. In peace, neither party could grasp what was happening to the farmer, to industry, or to the cities. With farms in trouble, factories booming and the U.S. already well on the way to becoming an urban nation, F.D.R. in 1921 made a major speech. He deplored the movement of population away from rural areas and urged that more be done to induce farm families to stay where they were. More surprisingly, he also warned that Washington and even state legislatures should stay clear of the problem. Responsibility to reverse the trend he saw as lying purely with local town and county governments.

Davis admires his subject for his courage, his shrewdness, his style, and (most of the time) his instinct to do the right thing. But Davis also says that F.D.R. must be numbered among those leaders (the vast majority) who could not really control great events and forces. He had a tendency to settle for the part of leading actor rather than seize responsibility in a difficult situation. More important, he formed no lasting political philosophy.

Why? Davis offers clues rather than conclusions. Roosevelt was a random collector--of stamps, people, ideas. He exploited his acquisitions, personal and intellectual, as needed, but rarely as part of a grand design. In the 1920s at least, despite his willingness to fight for particular schemes, compromise was never far from his mind. He made peace with Tammany, for instance, and it was Roosevelt, the sometimes stiff-necked patrician, who at various times advised Smith, the practical pol, to evade the Prohibition issue and straddle a dispute over the Ku Klux Klan. Smith refused both times -- and became one of the big losers in the history of presidential politics.

Laurence I. Barrett

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