Had it not been for last year’s election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, Robert Dallek’s new biography of Franklin D Roosevelt might have simply been a very good book. Given Trump, it feels like an essential one. Dallek, who has previously written biographies of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson, here captures a full life in a single volume with brisk prose. We see FDR’s rise, helped by his wife, Eleanor, within the Democratic party; his sudden contraction of polio, which left him paralysed from the waist down; his election, first as governor of New York and then president of the United States; his “New Deal” response to the Great Depression; and his leadership in the second world war.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were patrician bohemians, not radicals but liberal enough to include in their circle strong-willed eccentrics – the hyperactive gambler Harry Hopkins, or the cigar-smoking, slacks-wearing journalist Lorena Hickok – committed to social reform. Hopkins, among the most leftwing of FDR’s brain trust, made the Works Project Administration a success and organised FDR’s vast logistical wartime bureaucracy. Hickok, who as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration pushed the Roosevelts to attend to labour and civil rights issues, had become Eleanor’s most intimate emotional, and no doubt sexual, companion.
Dallek shows how Old Dutch family wealth, noblesse oblige, tolerance, a debilitating disease, and an interest in modernist culture combined to create in FDR an instinctively brilliant politician. The author says he wrote his account to remind “a younger generation with limited knowledge of American history, of what great political leadership looks like”. He only mentions Trump once, but FDR’s strengths – his ability to compromise, his regulatory programme and awareness of the environment, his diplomacy and care for social well-being – implicitly highlight Trump’s weaknesses.
Roosevelt, one of his contemporaries remarked, never gave “the impression he was tired or bored”, nor did he often show irritation. Trump has an attention span as long as a tweet and the impulses of a sugar-addled toddler. Polio robbed Roosevelt of the ability to walk, an open secret that he occasionally used to establish a bond with voters. “Imagine where I might have been without my private resources to rehabilitate myself?” he once asked. Here, Roosevelt was inviting voters to identify with him not to perpetuate a fantasy that they, too, might become millionaires, but rather as a way of generating human solidarity, a shared sense of how we all have times when we need help.
Dallek emphasises FDR’s nonideological nature, his willingness to try, and err, and try again. In so doing, he made some policy decisions that, in the long run, helped give rise to Trumpism. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932, in the depths of the depression, when faith among US citizens in the virtues of the laissez-faire state was at an all-time low. Promising “action, and action now”, he easily could have nationalised the banks. Instead he stabilised and regulated them, which Dallek says restored confidence. It also left finance free to regather its strength as a bastion of private power, which it used, starting in the 1970s, to spearhead the nation’s rapid deindustrialisation. In so doing, it laid the foundation for today’s low-wage unequal economy, which produces, in addition to anxiety and desperation, a steady stream of angry voters.
Roosevelt likewise wasted political capital and government resources reconstructing a collapsed agricultural sector, not so much saving small farms as creating a kind of agro-industrial corporatism. FDR, Dallek writes, should have focused “on the urban industrial centers as the mainstay of any revival”. Roosevelt’s modest, meagerly funded and short-lived Federal Writers Project stimulated a vibrant cultural modernism, employing authors such as Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow and artists such as Jackson Pollock. But for more than 80 years, New Deal federal programmes have pumped trillions of dollars into an ever smaller number of poorly paying agricultural corporations in a handful of mostly reactionary states, including Texas and Arizona, today’s base of Trumpism. Dallek doesn’t mention it, but Roosevelt also missed a chance to include a programme of national health care in his signature social security legislation, which, had it been included, would have narrowed the opportunities for the right to discredit the welfare state. And to appease southern Democratic party conservatives, he exempted agricultural workers, many of them African-Americans, from New Deal protections, including the right to organise labour unions. If the south had been able to unionise, the Dixiecrat backlash, which first targeted the civil rights movement but went on to defeat most of the New Deal, might have been less effective.
Dallek is a master of the genre of presidential biography, but how can one continue being a Rembrandt, detailing the light and shadow of golden age captains, after the arrival of the grotesque, when political culture has become a carnival? The genre, a moneymaker for big publishing houses during gift-giving seasons, provides important ideological support for American exceptionalism. Biographers generally treat their subject’s crimes and cruelties – Thomas Jefferson’s rape, Andrew Jackson’s genocide, or JFK’s sexual assault of a teenage White House intern – as personal foibles.
In FDR’s case, Dallek criticises the second world war internment of Japanese-Americans, his alliance with southern segregationists and refusal to come to the aid of Germany’s Jews. He might also have mentioned Roosevelt’s deportation of millions of undocumented Mexican migrant workers. In keeping with the genre’s formula, Dallek balances these wrongs against FDR’s many rights and gives him credit.
But Trump scrambles the formula. He represents one of two possibilities: he is either presiding over a wholly un-American movement that has captured the institutions of government; or he is the realisation, the manifest destiny, of an entirely American form of racism. Either way, future biographers will have a hard time describing Trump’s vices – such as his compulsion to humiliate successful African-Americans, demonise Mexicans and migrants and to coddle Nazis – as personal failings, and balance them against the nation’s virtues. Short of a complete revision of the genre into a branch of Marxism, my sense is that future presidential biographers will write with ever more hagiographic urgency, blurring whatever minimal distinctions mainstream historians made between “good” presidents such as FDR and catastrophic ones, such as George W Bush.
Still, Trump’s brutalism limits the ability of future presidential biographers to present less flattering details as simply part of building a character portrait. “Oh, Eleanor,” FDR rebuked his wife, after she joined an interview with Walter Lippmann, “Shut up. You never understand these things anyway.” “Uncharacteristic,” Dallek writes. “Blunt,” a previous biographer said of this encounter. “Trumpian” may well be the word future presidential biographers use to describe such scenes.
• Franklin D Roosevelt is published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £25.50 (RRP £30) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
