Advance Praise for Man of Destiny
“No one has written with greater authority on American political leadership in the 1930s and 1940s than Alonzo Hamby. Man of Destiny is simply the best one-volume biography of FDR we have—a superb, clear-headed study based on a lifetime of research and hard thinking.”
—Anthony Badger, author of FDR: The First Hundred Days
“FDR remains the most influential, enduring, and enigmatic leader of twentieth-century America. Alonzo Hamby’s book offers a fascinating portrait of Roosevelt, brilliantly capturing his political prescience and strategic acumen, as well as his personal egotism and intellectual inconsistency. Hamby explains how a very human president contributed to seemingly superhuman outcomes. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in history, politics, and leadership.”
—Jeremi Suri, author of Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama
Man of Destiny
FDR and the Making of the American Century
Alonzo L. Hamby
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2015 by Alonzo Hamby
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special [email protected].
Designed by Jack Lenzo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hamby, Alonzo L.
Man of destiny : FDR and the making of the American century / Alonzo Hamby.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-465-06167-9 (e-book) 1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Biography. 5. New Deal, 1933–1939. I. Title.
E807.H323 2015
973.917092—dc23
[B]
2015007617
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Joyce,
With thanks for so much,
for so long.
Contents
Preface
Part I: Becoming FDR
1. “The Best People”: Family and Identity, 1882–1896
2. Young Gentleman: Schooldays, 1896–1904
3. Eleanor and Franklin: Marriage, Family, Job, 1904–1910
4. Insurgent Progressive, 1910–1913
5. Riding in Front: Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913–1914
6. Armageddon: The Great War, 1914–1919
7. Victory in Defeat, 1919–1921
8. Paralysis and Philanthropy, 1921–1928
9. The Young Prince Returns, 1922–1928
10. Chief Executive: Power in Albany, 1929–1932
11. Destiny Calls: The Quest for the Presidency, January–July 1932
12. Much to Fear: Election and Interregnum, July 1932–March 1933
Part II: The New Deal
13. Nothing to Fear: Creating a New Deal, March–July 1933
14. Unlimited Ambitions, Limited Achievement: The First New Deal, July 1933–November 1934
15. Presidential Government: The Politics of Maximum Leadership, 1933–1934
16. Toward “A New Order of Things”: Origins of the Second New Deal, 1935
17. Rendezvous with Destiny: The Second New Deal and the Triumph of 1936
18. “Panic and Lack of Confidence”: The Economic and Political Consequences of the Second Hundred Days, 1937–1939
Part III: The World at War
19. Winds of War, 1933–1939
20. Private Plans and Public Danger, September 1939–November 1940
21. Undeclared War, December 7, 1940–December 7, 1941
22. Commander in Chief of the United Nations, December 1941–January 1943
23. Dr. New Deal at Bay: Mobilization and Mortality, 1942–1944
24. War and Diplomacy, February 1943–June 1944
25. Indispensable Man, June 6, 1944–November 7, 1944
26. The Quest for a New World Order, November 8, 1944–April 15, 1945
Epilogue. FDR and the American Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Preface
I have a hazy memory of my mother and father, seated near the family radio, listening to a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, likely his last fireside chat, on January 6, 1945. I have a much clearer recollection of hearing the late-afternoon bulletin on April 12, 1945, announcing Roosevelt’s death, and running to tell my mother.
Above that radio, for many years after the war, hung a wartime map of the world with pictures of Allied civilian and military leaders along its edges. Roosevelt at the top was the most prominently displayed. My parents taught me that he was the greatest of all American presidents. My mother always remembered his birthday and thought she knew his favorite song. (Could it really have been “Home on the Range”?) My father recalled that when his fortunes were at low ebb during the Depression, Roosevelt’s speeches had bucked him up. As a teenager, I began a practice of making Christmas donations to the March of Dimes, Roosevelt’s charity devoted to the treatment and eradication of polio. Some years later, as a professional historian writing about Harry S. Truman, I discovered that much of the controversy about HST revolved around a dispute over whether he was following the course FDR had charted.
A child of wealth and privilege, possessing unlimited will and ambition, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was destined to lead a nation large in population, rich in resources, and committed to a universalist ideology of liberal democracy. His twelve years in the White House culminated in the creation of what can justly be called an American century. This convergence of individual and national destinies created a large and complex story that remains essential to our understanding of the world in which we live today.
History is more than biography, but individual actors nonetheless chart its course. There are many accounts of Roosevelt’s life, most of them either laudatory tributes or blandly noninterpretive narratives in which large themes get lost. No twentieth-century American lived a bigger or more consequential life. I have attempted to treat it fully but economically and from a point of view that acknowledges genuine achievements while recognizing large failures. I hope I have succeeded in bringing out its meaning without taxing the reader’s patience.
A. L. H.
Athens, Ohio
January 2015
Part I
Becoming FDR
Chapter 1
“The Best People”
Family and Identity, 1882–1896
My dear Mama.
Thank you so much for the lovly soldiers. Brother Rosy may take a picture of our gardans because it look
s so nice. We are going to have a big bush in our gardans and it’s nearly two feet high. I take my rest evry day but I am not out much We have battles with the soldiers evry day. And they are so nice. Good bye dear Mama Your loving little
Franklin
P.S. Give my love to papa and Uncle Frank and Aunt Laura.1
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was six years old when he wrote this letter to his mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, in the spring of 1888. Franklin’s birth on January 30, 1882, had been a near-run thing, accomplished only after his mother had undergone twenty-four hours of excruciating labor and the administration of chloroform; the ten-pound baby who emerged then required mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The boy seems to have retained no buried sense of his precarious entry into existence. He lived contentedly in a safe, structured world, defined by the wealth and authority of his family.2
Roosevelts and Delanos, it seemed, had always been there, moneyed and prominent, quiet and steady, exemplifying the virtues of wealth, responsibility, and leadership. By the mid-nineteenth century, both families formed part of a well-defined, self-conscious stratum of the wealthy—“patricians,” the “gentility,” or the “Best People.” They treated their inherited wealth as an annuity to invest carefully that it might produce sufficient income to sustain an affluent lifestyle. They served on boards of directors but rarely acted as hands-on managers. They supported charities. In politics, they generally advocated reform in the sense of honest, efficient, and frugal government. But few deigned to run for office.
Economically, by the mid- to late nineteenth century the American nouveau riche—the entrepreneurs and financiers who built empires, made tons of money, and flaunted their riches—had surpassed the Best People. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Morgans, and slightly less luminous capitalists inevitably assimilated with them. Still, the distinction remained clear on both sides.3
The first of the American Roosevelts appears to have been a simple farmer from an island off the Dutch mainland, but his descendants prospered as merchants, bankers, investors in land, and sugar refiners. The Roosevelts maintained close family relationships throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Possessing modest to substantial wealth, they enjoyed status and esteem as members of the oldest families in New York, the Dutch-based Knickerbocker society.4
The Delanos traced their ancestry to French Calvinists (Huguenots) who had fled to the safety of Leiden in the Dutch Republic. In 1621, one of them followed the English Calvinist Pilgrims, who a year earlier had left on the Mayflower for America. His descendants found prosperity as shipbuilders, whalers, and overseas traders. Like the Roosevelts, the Delanos exemplified how early settlement, old money, and entrepreneurial talent over several generations would lead to a special social standing. Warren Delano II made a fortune in what the family later delicately called “the China trade”—selling opium to the Chinese, a dangerous but extraordinarily lucrative business. He married eighteen-year-old Catherine Lyman in 1843 and fathered eleven children with her.5
A formidable man, Delano dominated his offspring and enforced his will strictly, inspiring, as Sara Delano Roosevelt later put it, “equal parts of awe and fear.” Prospective husbands for his daughters had to possess a strong character and a “competence” of at least $100,000, the equivalent of $1.5 million or more in the early twenty-first century.6
Franklin’s father, James Roosevelt, led a pedestrian life compared to that of Warren Delano. Yet their families had similar roots and shared values grounded in the seventeenth-century Calvinism that had migrated from England and the Netherlands to the northeastern United States. The Roosevelt fortune had been made well before James was born in 1828; though not as grand as Warren Delano’s, it was sufficient to sustain a comfortable life among the American gentry.
The usually dutiful son of a nonpracticing physician who preached straitlaced morality, James had displayed traces of rebellion and self-assertion. He insisted on attending the University of New York (now NYU), failed mathematics and Latin courses, and was sent home. Shipped off to Union College in Schenectady, he joined a so-called secret society that held its meetings in a local tavern. He achieved distinction as a student; graduating in July 1847, he delivered the class oration. Demanding a grand tour of Europe, he arrived as the liberal revolutions of 1848 broke out across the continent. In Italy, he served briefly in Giuseppe Garibaldi’s revolutionary army. He returned home in May 1849, after an exciting year and a half.7
Harvard Law School followed, and James graduated with the class of 1851. Two years later, Harvard’s most prestigious eating club, Porcellian, made him an honorary member. His talent and family connections won him a place with a prestigious corporate law firm. He made his country residence at Mount Hope, a Hudson River estate inherited from his grandfather.
By then, American capitalism was approaching what later development theorists would call a takeoff point. The age of steel and steam, embodied in railroads and the coal that fired their boilers, had arrived. The Roosevelts, aligned with their relatives, the Aspinwall and Howland families, built formidable business combinations in both industries. James became a partner and made the relationship intimate by marrying his second cousin, Rebecca Brien Howland, in 1853. Hardly out of law school, he was elected a director of the Consolidated Coal Company of Maryland. Soon he was also general manager of the Cumberland and Pennsylvania Railroad. Other such ventures would follow throughout his life.
James Roosevelt measured risk carefully, never put all his eggs in one basket, and scrupulously limited his liability, but he was more than a fusty collector of dividends and directorship stipends. He thought big and promoted visionary enterprises, wagering that the America in which he had come of age would develop into a mighty nation with global reach. After the Civil War, he and his relations built on their coal operations, establishing the Consolidation Coal Company, the nation’s largest producer of bituminous coal. Separately, he and others partnered with Tom Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a would-be rail monopolist, to establish a holding company designed to buy a controlling interest in the major trunk lines of the old Confederacy; Scott hoped to link these to his grand and ultimately unfulfilled project for a southern transcontinental Texas and Pacific Railroad. James made a substantial personal investment and was elected the company’s president. The Panic of 1873 and the depression that followed put all these enterprises on the rocks.8
James’s grandest and most daring speculation came in the 1880s and early 1890s: the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua proposed to build an Atlantic-Pacific canal through that Central American nation. The extent of his investment is uncertain. His greatest value to the company lay in his close relationship with Democratic president Grover Cleveland, whom he had supported generously. He moved his family to Washington, DC, during the winter of 1887 to lobby for a federal appropriation. Although a rational alternative to a canal through Panama, the plan ultimately ran afoul of the great depression of the 1890s and the vagaries of politics in both the United States and Nicaragua. Its stock eventually became worthless.9
Through it all, James received a consistent stream of income from other investments. First among them was the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, which also operated railroads and anthracite coal mines. He served as one of its vice presidents and often used a private railway car for personal and business trips.
He and Rebecca lived much of the year at Mount Hope, wintered at their Manhattan town house, enjoyed long trips to Europe, exchanged visits with their extended families, and attended glittering social events. Their only child, a son, was born on March 27, 1854. His father, employing the Dutch equivalent of the English “junior,” named him James Roosevelt Roosevelt. Inevitably, he became known inside and outside the family as “Rosy.” Handsome, energetic, intelligent, and unserious, he would become a dashing young man, marry into the Astor family, and serve for a time as a junior member of the US diplomatic service
.
In September 1865, Mount Hope burned to the ground while the family was away on a yearlong trip to Europe. James decided against rebuilding and bought an estate two or so miles up the east side of the Hudson River at Crum Elbow, just south of the small village of Hyde Park. It consisted of a large house, outbuildings, and 110 acres of farmland. He had the house modernized and furnished it elegantly. Over several years, he acquired adjoining land until he owned a thousand acres, some of it wooded, some of it pasture for purebred horses and cattle, much of it devoted to commercial farming. The house required eight to ten servants; the farming operation employed numerous additional workers. James called his little empire “Springwood.” Rosy and his wife would eventually occupy a comfortable country home (“the little Red House”) on the grounds.
James became a person of substance in the Hyde Park community and developed a life resembling that of an English squire. He took up membership in the local Episcopal congregation, St. James Church, where he was a vestryman and for a time senior warden. He also served as an overseer of the local public school and the county jail, won election to the town’s board of supervisors, and became prominent for his charities. A fine horseman, he sponsored and led the annual Dutchess County hunt. As he moved into middle age, he looked the part of a man of distinction—fit but carrying a little extra weight, sporting mutton-chop whiskers, wearing tailored Scottish tweeds and a top hat. He became known to his employees and many of the townspeople as “Mr. James.”
His politics were representative of those of the Best People with one exception—he was a Democrat. He had no truck with the radical Democrats of the West and the South who wanted to debase the dollar, attack business, and spend recklessly. Nor did he give more than token support to the Irish-based urban Democratic machines of the North, such as New York’s Tammany Hall. Essentially, he was a Jeffersonian, believing in small, frugal government, low taxes, free trade, and sound money, even if he did not shy from federal subsidies for internal development. The New York politician he most admired, Grover Cleveland, epitomized this creed.
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