A ruthless ally

One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last American presidential election was contested between the son of a former president and the son of a former senator; while the most famous American president of what one of his vice- presidents called the century of the common man was a rich patrician who grew up as far as could be imagined from the proverbial log cabin.

Among the old New York aristocracy, the Roosevelts stood high, not quite the longest-settled and not quite as rich as some newer families, but well-respected and self-confident in the year 1882, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born on their estate at Hyde Park overlooking the Hudson. ‘Delano’ (which later gave Mussolini much amusement: ‘of the anus’ in Italian) was originally de la Noye; FDR was prouder of that Huguenot ancestry than of the way the Delanos had made their recent pile in the opium trade. He received a conventional education at Groton and Harvard, where he didn’t do much work and wasn’t especially popular. By the time he became president, Roosevelt was reviled by the rich as a demagogic class traitor, and in this very detailed but always readable and often unlikely biography Conrad Black thinks there may have been an element of truth in this, or at least that he gained ‘some special gratification in running as a champion of the common man against caricatured groups of complacent and greedy inheritors’ (the fact that the biographer identifies so strongly with this tribune of the people against the greedy rich is what I mean by unlikely).