Tag Archives: Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The Man Who Most Believed in Himself

19 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by in Biography, Politics

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“[Franklin] Roosevelt faced formidable challenges as president, but he never doubted that he would cope with them, for he believed that he belonged in the White House. He had sat on Grover Cleveland’s knee, cast his first vote for Uncle Teddy, and seen Woodrow Wilson at close range; but the office seemed peculiarly his almost as a birthright. As Richard Neustadt has observed: ‘Roosevelt, almost alone among our Presidents, had no conception of the office to live up to; he was it. His image of the office was himself-in-office.’ He loved the majesty of the position, relished its powers, and rejoiced in the opportunity it offered for achievement. ‘The essence of Roosevelt’s Presidency,’ Clinton Rossiter has written, ‘was his airy eagerness to meet the age head on. Thanks to his flair for drama, he acted as if never in all history had there been times like our own.’

A Washington reporter noted in 1933: ‘No signs of care are visible to his main visitors or at the press conferences. He is amiable, urbane and apparently untroubled. He appears to have a singularly fortunate faculty for not becoming flustered. Those who talk with him informally in the evenings report that he busies himself with his stamp collection, discussing in an illuminating fashion the affairs of state while he waves his shears in the air.’ Even after Roosevelt had gone through the trials of two terms of office, Time reported: ‘He has one priceless attribute: a knack of locking up his and the world’s worries in some secret mental compartment, and then enjoying himself to the top of his bent. This quality of survival, of physical toughness, of champagne ebullience is one key to the big man. Another key is this: no one has ever heard him admit that he cannot walk.”

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Pulled from William E. Leuchtenburg’s essay “The First Modern President,” which you’ll find in The American President or Fred I. Greenstein’s great collection Leadership in the Modern Presidency.

In context, that last sentence really does it. (Neustadt’s quote above is pulled from Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, for my money one of the most entertaining reads on the art of Presidential leadership.)

Image: ScienceSource

Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by in History, War

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Confederate Soldiers 3

“Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the war, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. ‘I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,’ Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. ‘Just as I would have,’ Foote said. ‘I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between the North and the South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.’

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. ‘It’s a bunch of shit really,’ Foote conceded. ‘But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.’ In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. ‘It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of “I won’t give up, I won’t be insulted.”’

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ ‘abiding love’ for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. ‘It was a big admission, if you think about it,’ Foote said. ‘A Civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.'”

Shelby Foote 2

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Excerpted from Tony Horwitz’s chronicle of the south’s Lost Cause nearly a century and a half later Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

More warfare:

Can We Be Optimistic about America’s Future? (Yes, Says Charles Krauthammer)

02 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Politics, Speeches

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Charles Krauthammer

“Looking down the road, to the future of the United States, I… I really am, despite the burden of our current problems, optimistic.

If you believe, as I do, in the political ideology of liberty; in the importance of an open civil society, and that the relationship between the citizen and the state should be a limited one, then I think you must believe that, if we can advocate those ideas clearly enough, we will win out in the end. And when you take away the other contaminants — the personalities, the contingencies, the financial crises, the Congressional gridlocks, the things that are confined to ‘the times’ — those ideals will survive for another generation. And that’s why I think, in the end, reality does win out. That’s why I’m confident.

Let me just end by saying that I’ve always had a sense that there is something providential about American history — and this is from somebody who isn’t strictly religious. But here is a nation founded on the edge of civilization by a tiny colony, living on the outskirts of the civilized world — one that, at a time when it needs it, miraculously finds within its borders the most brilliant generation of political thinkers in the history of the world. Then, a century later, when it needs a Lincoln, it finds a Lincoln. Then, in the 20th century, when it needed an FDR to fight and destroy fascism, it found it. When it needed Reagan to revive the country, it found one. And I don’t think there is a Reagan or an FDR on our horizon.

But there’s something about American history that redeems itself in a way that should inspire even the most pessimistic cynic. The way I would summarize the root of this feeling is by quoting my favorite pundit, Otto von Bismarck. He’s not known for his punditry, but he did famously say that, “God looks after four things: children, drunks, idiots… and the United States of America.”

I think he still does. I hope he still does. Thank you.”

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Charles Krauthammer, speaking off-the-cuff at the closing of his address to last summer’s Bradley Symposium.

More from Bradley:

A Chekist on the Global Chessboard

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Interview, Politics

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Vladimir Putin

Brian Lamb: Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you say [Putin] was a ‘Cheka’?

Anne Applebaum: Putin was a member of the secret police, which was later called the KGB. And the old name — the Leninist era name — for the KGB is the Cheka. And Putin has described himself as a ‘Chekist,’ which is an old fashioned word for secret policeman.

Brian Lamb: What does that mean to you?

Anne Applebaum: The first time I heard him say it, it filled me with horror. It’s like somebody saying, “I was a Brownshirt.” It has very, very unpleasant connotations.

Brian Lamb: Why do you think he says it?

Anne Applebaum: He says it because it gives him an aura of invincibility. ‘We were the people behind the scenes who were running the old Soviet Union.’ The term still commands a certain amount of respect in Russia. A poll was done recently which showed that some 60 or 70 percent of Russians still think Lenin was a great man who contributed to their country. So he’s echoing a respect for the Russian Revolution.

Brian Lamb: I read a story in The New York Times about Saddam Hussein which read just like [accounts of the Soviet Gulag] —  the enemies lists that they had, the kind of people they put away, the torturing that went on. How much of this is still going on around the world?

Anne Applebaum: I would say a great deal. The Stalinist regime — and later the Krushchevite and Brezhnevite regimes in the Soviet Union — actually spread their techniques, and they taught people around the world how to run police states. I have no doubt that, through the East Germans, Saddam Hussein’s police state was probably set up with Russian or Soviet advice.

It is not an accident that so many of these systems share so much in common; there was a set of techniques, they were deliberately spread. The Soviet camp was exported to China; the Chinese exported it to North Korea. The North Korean Gulag that exists today sounds, from what little we know about it, very much like Stalin’s Gulag.

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From Anne Applebaum’s 2003 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, discussing her Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gulag: A History.

I sometimes think it all boils down to names. We had Roosevelt (Dutch for “rose garden”) then Truman (Old English: “honest man”); Chamberlain (“servant of a bed chamber”) then Churchill (“church’s hill”) and Attlee (“from the meadow”).

They had Stalin (“man of steel”) and his henchmen: Kamenev (“man of stone”), Molotov (“hammer”), Lenin (“from the River Lena”) — and Trotsky (The name on one of young Lev Bronstein’s fake passports, which wound up catching on).

Putin, though he mysteriously lacks a single antecedent family member who shares his surname, lays claim to a strangely appropriate etymology: “on his way”, “on his path”.

In the next few weeks, I’ll post more on this topic as well as excerpts from Applebaum’s book, which as far as I can tell is now considered the preeminent history of the Soviet prison and slave labor system (a Google search for “gulag book” displays it first, above Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago). Gulag concludes with a clear-eyed rumination on the post-Soviet psyche, especially as it is expressed by today’s Russians and enacted in the 20th century atavisms of their largely popular Chekist-in-Chief. Writing in her epilogue a decade ago, Applebaum observed,

[T]en years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia, the country that has inherited the Soviet Union’s diplomatic and foreign policies, its embassies, its debts, and its seat at the United Nations, continues to act as if it has not inherited the Soviet Union’s history. Russia does not have a national museum dedicated to the history of repression. Nor does Russia have a national place of mourning, a monument which officially recognizes the suffering of victims and their families…

Many Russians experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union as a profound blow to their personal pride. Perhaps the old system was bad, they now feel—but at least we were powerful. And now that we are not powerful, we do not want to hear that it was bad. It is too painful, like speaking ill of the dead.

Unlike most attempts at mass psychoanalysis, these considerations are hardly trivial, especially as we attempt to internalize what is happening in Ukraine and perhaps anticipate the Chekist’s next move.

On a brighter note: I recommend not only Applebaum’s substantial book, but also her columns, which are printed in The Washington Post. Along with Danielle Crittenden (wife of conservative political commentator David Frum), she has also published a cook book on Polish comfort food — and though I can’t speak to its merits, I can say that when juxtaposed with her work on the famines of Stalinism makes her probably the most versatile author I’ve cited on this blog. (Below: Applebaum and Crittenden; below that, Applebaum with her sons and husband, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.)

Anne Applebaum and Danielle Crittenden Anne Applebaum and Family

The Real Wolf of Wall Street Was One of the Most Honorable Men of the Last Century

19 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in History, Original

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Bernard Baruch

Jordan Belfort is not the real Wolf of Wall Street. The original holder of that title was Bernard Baruch, a wholly admirable investor and public servant whose life – an exercise in panache and prudence – serves as an almost perfect juxtaposition to the nouveau riche Rabelasian, flash-in-the-pan fraudster caricatured in Martin Scorsese’s most recent film.

Bernard Mannes Baruch was born in Camden, South Carolina in 1870. At 11, his family moved to New York City, and in little over a decade he had landed a job as a broker with Wall Street’s esteemed A.A. Housman & Company. By the time he was celebrating his thirtieth birthday, Baruch had made enough money to buy himself his own seat on the New York Stock Exchange (roughly $450,000 in current USD), becoming known as the “Lone Wolf of Wall Street” since he opted not to associate with any of New York City’s established financial houses.

But Baruch was more than just an avaricious businessman who accumulated wealth by himself, for himself. In 1916, he placed his lucrative career on hold, leaving Wall Street to work as an advisor on President Wilson’s national defense and peace team. Through this position he became chairman of the War Industries Board, which helped to ratchet up the American economy during the First World War. As the conflict drew to a close, Wilson asked Baruch to serve as an envoy to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; Baruch, taking on the role with enthusiasm, became one of the most vociferous critics of the restrictions and reparations levied by Britain and France on the ravaged German state.

As easy as it would’ve been to resort to I-told-you-so cynicism in the decades that followed, Baruch spent those tumultuous years doing his part to prepare the United States for its impending collision with Eurasian fascism. A supporter of President Roosevelt’s domestic economic initiatives, Baruch was part of the “Brain Trust” behind the National Recovery Administration that helped offset the structural unemployment and liabilities which were gumming up the gears of the U.S. economy. When the war finally began, Baruch helped craft the “work or fight” bill. After it ended, his prescience led him to push for the creation of an international body to oversee all of the world’s then-novel atomic energy. Baruch also coined that soon ubiquitous term “Cold War.”

Despite his myriad financial, political, and philanthropic offices, I think Baruch’s greatest title was that of the “Park Bench Statesman.” Regardless of the city, he preferred to do his best thinking while taking walks, preferably in parks and usually on Sunday afternoons. Whether in Washington’s Lafayette Square or New York’s Central Park, Baruch would regularly amble for a while then rest on a park bench, where he would converse about matters governmental and economic with whomever was nearby. For his 90th birthday, the Boy Scouts of America dedicated a bench to the Wolf in Lafayette Square across from the White House. It sits there today.

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The majority of this information is sourced from James Grant’s biography Bernard Baruch.

“It will fluctuate.” – Baruch, when asked by an eager journalist to predict the market

“Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.” – Baruch, when asked which candidate to support

I’ve added that aphorism to the quotes page.

Bernard Baruch

Bernard Baruch

FDR: President of Paradoxes

28 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Original, Politics, Psychology, Writing

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FDR

As the funeral train carrying the casket of Franklin Delano Roosevelt pulled into Washington’s Union Station, a reporter for a local paper approached one mourner and asked, “Why are you here? Did you know the President?” The man raised his moist eyes and muttered, “No, but he knew me.” The truth of this infamous story may never be proven, yet the fact that it seems to crystallize is undeniable: the 32nd President of the United States stands unrivaled in the public support and personal sympathy he elicited from the American people. As his wife Eleanor remarked, “I never realized the true scope of the devotion to him until he died.” Yet Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s roots could not have contrasted more with those of the common men who mourned on the day of his death. The only son of an abundantly affluent family, Franklin enjoyed all the luxuries afforded the upper crust of American society, as well as the intangible benefits – the power and political connections – that such a pedigree confers. Thus, Franklin was a President of paradoxes – elite yet common, capable yet crippled, gregarious yet guarded; he was “A Traitor to His Class” according to the title of one biography, “The Lion and the Fox” according to another.

As a result, to understand the psychology of Roosevelt, it is essential to first explicate the many contradictions that defined his personal and political lives. For while these inconsistencies each seem to fall into that wide gap separating private existence from public image, they nevertheless represent the defining factors of Roosevelt’s personality, character, and psyche. For the purpose of my analysis, I will examine the full history of Roosevelt – from fortunate son to fickle family man, from callow lawyer to poised President – in order to illuminate the specific psychological motivations that defined his life. Moreover, I will graft Roosevelt’s biography onto the theoretical framework formulated by Stanley A. Renshon, illuminating the specific ways in which Roosevelt’s psychology may be more starkly revealed through Renshon’s conceptual model of leadership psychology. Through this exercise, I aim to explain both the what and why of Roosevelt’s actions, ultimately revealing the who, the obscured psychological profile, that exists beneath the man so many have missed and memorialized since his funeral car first pulled into Union Station.

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The opening paragraphs of ‘FDR: President of Paradoxes’ — an essay I’ve just finished for my graduate program in American Government.

For this essay, I read several biographies of Roosevelt to draw a psychological profile of the man as a son, father, friend, and leader. Like the title of the essay indicates, my approach stressed the contradictions of Roosevelt’s life — the vast number of conflicts, inconsistencies, and even hypocrisies which defined the personality and work of one of our most beloved Presidents. I may post or try to publish the full essay in the near future.

My favorite sources are Jean Edward Smith’s FDR, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s equally daunting No Ordinary Time, and James McGregor Burns’s more manageable Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1882-1940).

The damage done, my desk:

FDR Books