Father of the nation

Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it be known that he was reading a book about FDR, and tumbleweed blew through the newsrooms. Which is odd because for many decades FDR was every bit the model liberal as Ronald Reagan was the model conservative. Roosevelt was credited with ending the Great Depression, laying the foundations of a welfare state and leading America through the second world war — achievements for which he was rewarded with not one, not two but four election victories. And he did all of this despite being an elitist East Coaster with a wife who was very probably a lesbian. So cool was the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor, so European, that when Eleanor was asked what she thought of one of her husband’s election victories, she replied: ‘What difference does it make to me?’

Robert Dallek’s superb book explores how they got away with it. Roosevelt was helped somewhat by the era he lived in. Journalists were more willing to pretend he hadn’t been left crippled by a paralytic illness — and the public had no need to know that Eleanor didn’t always spend Christmas with her husband. But the idea that the 1930s was a more genteel age in which it was far easier to govern is bull. Congress was divided not only by party but by region and ideology — and both sides liked to throw around labels like ‘communist’ or ‘fascist’. General Douglas MacArthur applauded a Republican congressman who said that Roosevelt was a proto-monarch, determined to ‘destroy the rights of the common people’. In 1938, a citizen from Atlanta wrote to FDR: ‘Try dipping your head in a pail of water three times and just bring it out twice.