FDR A Practical Magician (February/March 1983 | Volume: 34, Issue: 2)

FDR A Practical Magician

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Authors: John Kenneth Galbraith

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February/March 1983 | Volume 34, Issue 2

THAT FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was, and preeminently so, the dominant political figure of this century—that he stood astride its first half like the Colossus itself—will not be in doubt. Nor are the reasons subject to serious dispute. It was his fate and fortune to face the two great tragedies of the time and to guide its greatest social achievement. The tragedies were, of course, the Second World War and the Great Depression, and few will quarrel as to the bearing of these two events on the Roosevelt transcendence. The world emerged better and in many ways stronger from both. We will never know, in either case, the disasters, even catastrophes, that might have been.

There can be equally little disagreement on Roosevelt’s part in the most significant achievement of the age. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who led the great transition in modern capitalism in the United States—the transition from an economic and social system in which participants were expected to bear the cost of their own helplessness or misfortune, earned or unearned, to one in which a compassionate protection tempered the inherent hardships and cruelties of the economy. Unemployment compensation, old-age pensions, lower-cost housing, varied support to agriculture, employment opportunity, and much more came together to compose this change that has earned the name the Roosevelt Revolution.

The revolution that Roosevelt brought about is both celebrated and not quite forgiven to this day. The poor are still thought by the stern to be unduly favored, with moral damage resulting. Under free enterprise, men, women, and children are meant to suffer; that suffering, like more income to the affluent, is essential as an incentive. No one would be more pleased than FDR at the success of the Roosevelt Revolution or less surprised at the deeply theological resistance it continues to engender.

There is general agreement, then, that the Depression, the war, and the great economic and social transformation of the first half of the twentieth century were central to the making of the Age of Roosevelt. Historians can often unite even on the obvious. What remains sharply in debate are the qualities of mind and personality that brought FDR, faced with such tragedy and such challenge, to such eminence. Never did history have so dense a pace as between 1932 and 1945. There was enough in those years to have overthrown a lesser man a dozen times. What allowed one leader so completely to dominate such a time?

Because love and loyalty have a blinding effect, the testimony of anyone who was there is somewhat flawed. The word of FDR’s death, which reached me on that April evening in 1945, brought a sense of trauma I had never previously experienced in my life. I had felt a faith, affection, and commitment that, it seemed, would last forever. Not in the preceding twelve years had it occurred to me that a President might be wrong. Were a Roosevelt decision or action in conflict with my earlier