F.D.R.: Creator of Modern Progressivism (minus identity essentialism)

The Man Who Created the Foundation for Our Politics Today

Photo by Jessica Tan on Unsplash

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Love him or hate him, FDR did a lot to change modern politics. I recently read—for the second delicious time—Jean Edward Smith’s 2008 bestselling biography, simply titled FDR, published 2008. I listened to it, actually. Thirty-two hours, aka 880 pages. The prose is beautiful, simple, direct, communicative and to the point.

Biographies have always fascinated me, whether about authors (one of my favorites is the 2008 biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, by D.T. Max) or musicians (I loved Stephen Davis’s 2004 Jim Morrison: Life. Death. Legend) or killers (I enjoyed Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, by Jeff Guinn), philosophers (John Foley’s Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt), or politicians (Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life), etc.

FDR—Franklin Delano Roosevelt—was born and raised in Hyde Park in upstate New York. He was born in 1882—the same year as James Joyce, I might add—and died in 1945, before we dropped the bomb. He came from sophisticated, wealthy, silk-stocking, silver-spoon, patrician families, the Delanos and the Roosevelts. They were something like the famous New York Astor family. Combined, the two families, besides there having been merchants, bankers, inventors, horse-breeders, businessmen of many stripes, and real estate investors, between the two clans were produced four U.S. presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, Theodore Roosevelt, and T.R.’s fifth cousin, FDR (who was elected four times, unprecedented before or after his tenure in the White House).

FDR did not have to work as a young man. He focused on school, first Groton and then Harvard. After that he went to Columbia Law School and, for a while, practiced corporate civil law. Sara Ann Delano, FDR’s wealthy mother, supported her son financially. He knew, from a young age, he’d be set when his parents passed. His father died when FDR was only 18. James Roosevelt left most of his fortune to his wife, but also left something for FDR personally.

Becoming bored with law, he eventually decided to run for local political office. Why not: It was in his patrician DNA. He was elected to the New York state senate. He did this for two years until, after helping to get the brutally racist Woodrow Wilson elected (Wilson famously segregated the White House and all staff), he was tapped by Wilson as the assistant secretary to the U.S. Navy. This he enjoyed for the most part and did for seven years, from 1913 to 1920. It was during this time that he learned much about the rules of politics: How to talk with Congress, how to rub politicians’ backs to get a favor later, how to reach across the political aisle.

But really he came into political young adulthood between 1929 and 1932 as the 44^th governor of New York. This was surprising because he’d come down with polio (“infantile paralysis) in 1921, at the spry age of 39. No one thought he could seriously run for statewide (or any) office. Republicans ran a nasty smear campaign against him, criticizing his physical issues in bold, naked terms. But Republicans failed.

Roosevelt was elected, despite his physical limitations. And despite the fact that he’d pushed back against Tammany Hall Democrats who wanted him to run. He pushed against this plea, but didn’t refuse. FDR didn’t think someone like him, with a physical disability, could realistically be elected in 1920s America. Democrats reminded voters that politics required brains, not physical strength. And actually he’d been looked at by doctors and was perfectly healthy and strong…minus his weak and useless legs. This observation had become a public spectacle. Republicans—certain of his physical weakness—had charged FDR with being physically unhealthy and, in their foggy minds, therefore incompetent to serve as governor. Uncannily, FDR proved them wrong. The media had a field day, as did the Democrats.

In 1905 FDR had married his fifth cousin once removed, Eleanor Roosevelt (it was more common to do this back then). He’d also, both as state senator of New York and assistant secretary of the Navy, played dangerous political games with New York’s indefatigable, potent Tammany Hall, the infamous political organization run by powerful Irish Catholics in the state, founded in 1786. FDR tried to skip above and below and around Tammany Hall and finally learned that without the organization he wouldn’t go far. He’d lost in 1920 running for vice president. Besides Eleanor, he also had Louis Howe on his side, a reporter for the New York Herald and FDR’s lifelong friend, confidant, and advisor, one of the few men in Roosevelt’s orbit who could be totally honest with the president.

It was as governor of New York that the true, more mature FDR arrived on the political scene. All of this was occurring between 1929 and 1932, when the Great Depression hit, marked officially by Black Tuesday when the stock market crashed brutally. Herbert Hoover was president, a moderate Republican who seemed to have a laissez faire approach to the flailing economy, lifting not a finger to help the struggling American People. Famously, poverty-stricken farmers and others gathered all across the country living in what people referred to as Hoovervilles. These were tent-cities, essentially, made up of homeless and desperate Americans, hoping against hope for some economic relief. Hoover’s policy was to sit back and do nothing. Let the market fix itself. Let the system recalibrate organically.

Roosevelt, as governor, was fairly radical.

He supported the idea of unemployment insurance. He pushed for financial aid to struggling farmers, believing that if farmers failed, it would deeply impact everybody. He was a big supporter of rural electrification. (Many parts of the state and the middle of the nation were not electrified yet, living a sort of 19^th century existence). FDR supported reforestation. He was a strong supporter of the notion of full and guaranteed employment for all Americans. He supported old-age pensions and created TERA: the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. FDR was all about government spending, regulation, and making sure all citizens were taken care of.

This formed the initial early basis of his “New Deal Coalition.” This was a time—this sounds radical, even impossible now—where Democrats and Republicans frequently not only reached across the aisle and worked together, but often helped each other get bills passed. The divide between Democrats and Republicans in the 1920s and 1930s was not polarized and sharply defined as it is now. It’s interesting to note that the original party of Black Voters was the Republican Party. The “Party of Lincoln,” the president who’d freed the slaves. From 1870, five years after the end of the civil war—when Black Americans first finally got the vote—until 1936, Black Americans overwhelmingly voted Republican.

Even during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights period, it was often Republicans who stepped across party lines to get civil rights legislation passed. This was mainly because, liberal as a large chunk of the Democratic party may have been, they still had the solid racist Southern Democrat (the so-called “Dixiecrat”) base. Around the issue of civil rights, in the 60s and 70s, most of those racist Southern Dems switched to the other side, creating, in part, the Republican party we’ve known since then.

Black Americans switched to the Democrats in 1936 for one reason: FDR. It wasn’t that Roosevelt was good on civil rights—he wasn’t—it was that he was solid on employment and financial relief during the Depression, and since the Depression disproportionately affected Black Americans, they switched to the Dem side. FDR wasn’t good on civil rights though. The main problem was that he had to court the southern racist voters in congress. Without them—they were in his party—even with Dem control of both houses, he wouldn’t be able to accomplish his New Deal program. When an anti-lynching bill appeared before congress (and not for the first time), following some brutal southern racist lynchings, FDR ignored it and remained silent. He didn’t campaign on identity issues or civil rights. He and Eleanor were notoriously (in the early days, and especially Eleanor) antisemitic. Their views did change for the better over time, particularly during World War II.

Once FDR proved himself as governor, word spread fast that he would be the 1932 Democratic nominee for president. This time he knew how to satiate and pacify Tammany Hall. How to play the game. How to gladhand and cut deals and do favors. FDR, with his handsome features and big grin and humorous, sarcastic mien, knew how to get places. Besides, he was a Roosevelt. The name itself held a lot of power and sway. His older fifth cousin was Theodore Roosevelt for Christ Sakes. The man came from a family.

Mocking Hoover’s Do-Nothing attitude—especially after the crash of the stock market in 1929—FDR won the Dem nomination, alongside his vice choice, John Nance Garner. Roosevelt was unstoppable. The people were desperate for financial relief. Everyone was struggling. Banks were failing left and right. Homes were being repossessed, lost to foreclosure. Millions had lost their life savings and fortunes in the market crash. It was a financial 9/11. And Hoover didn’t seem to give a crap.

FDR destroyed Hoover, winning 57% of the popular vote and carrying all but six states. He drew massive, adoring crowds. He immediately—in his first 100 days—closed the banks so that people would stop making runs on them, extracting their money in fear. He appropriated a ton of government money via congress and spent it. There was a wild flurry of legislation and executive orders passed.

One bill (Glass-Steagall) created the FDIC—Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—which protected bank consumers by guaranteeing bank deposits and also separating high-risk investment banking from commercial banking. He created FERA: Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which doled out financial assistance to the states. He created the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act) which paid farmers to leave land unused. The PWA, Public Works Administration, created bridges, dams, schools. The Federal Trade Commission monitored the stock market. The CCC—Civilian Conservation Corps—was formed which hired a quarter of a million unemployed men to work on various rural projects. The National Industrial Recovery Act regulated industries, shifting them towards fair play. And the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) modernized agriculture to a shocking degree.

In other words: There was a massive infusion of government spending injected into the flailing economy. Millions were put to work. Workers were supported and given more power. Collective bargaining was allowed. Unions formed and strengthened. Organized labor finally had a voice against major corporations reaping epic profits. Government stepped in and regulated free market enterprise to a degree never before seen in the United States. Roosevelt formed the National Labor Relations Board and created Social Security, which all Americans now take for granted.

In 1936 FDR won just under 61% of the popular vote and carried all but two states. He was unstoppable.

Besides Roosevelt’s failures on civil rights (one could reasonably and practically argue that had he been a staunch public supporter of civil rights he’d have lost the racist Southern vote and without that he never would have passed his New Deal legislation, which hugely benefitted Black Americans), he made a gigantic blunder. This one was strictly about ego and personal power. His penchant for revenge against those who crossed him was legendary. In 1937, disliking that some in his own party were not as supportive of his ideas as he wanted, and specifically disliking that some of the New Deal laws had been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (the court had approved most of the New Deal program), FDR did something unoriginal in American politics but fairly anti-Democratic and authoritarian-leaning: He tried to pack the court. This means he presented a bill to add several members to the Supreme Court.

The goal was to appoint his own more loyal judges so that, even if some of the current judges ruled against FDR, he would still have a majority. This, of course, is tyrannical in nature. It was one of Roosevelt’s biggest blunders as a politician and statesman. The separation and balance of powers—executive, legislative, judicial—is crucial to an open and free Democratic society. This fiasco split the Democratic party down the middle. It became polarized between liberals, moderates and fringe progressives (who often, like today, felt that FDR hadn’t gone far enough).

FDR lost the court battle, thankfully, and the country, and congress, moved on. FDR recovered and was elected, of course, a third and finally a fourth time.

The United States grew uneasy in the early 1930s as Hitler came to power in Germany. Fascism was on the rise: Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan. Japan, who the U.S. sold oil to, had attacked Manchuria in 1932 and mainland China in 1937. Japan’s imperial ambitions were daunting and worrisome. But it was Hitler which irked FDR the most. An unstable psychopath who wanted revenge for the “stab in the back” by the Jews after the Treaty of Versailles in World War I. Germany had been humiliated after the war, hobbled militarily and economically by the U.S., France and Britain. The economy had crashed. The German people were bitter, angry and resentful. They wanted power back.

The 1930s were all about appeasement. France and England repeatedly allowed Hitler to push and expand. Hitler annexed Austria in 1938. Then Kristallnacht happened, Jews being killed and expelled. The U.S. remained neutral. They still smelled the death of World War I in their nostrils, from only 20 years prior. FDR consistently repeated that the U.S. would not be sending American boys overseas to fight in any European wars. Unless, of course, they were attacked first.

It started with financial support of Britain. Arms and ships and planes. When the British essentially ran out of money FDR came up with lend-lease wherein we essentially loaned ships and materiel to the British in exchange for 99-year leases on a variety of their military bases. Slowly, FDR realized the U.S. needed to take a global approach. The League of Nations had been formed after WWI. FDR would later call it the United Nations. A global partnership and manner of seeing the world they all inhabited developed. Roosevelt’s thinking was shifting more and more away from isolation and neutrality and closer and closer to war.

The main issue stemmed with Japan. To attempt to check their imperial lust, FDR warned them of an oil embargo. They couldn’t wage war without oil which ran their planes, ships and cars. FDR knew they’d be forced to either lessen their aggression or else find a new seller for oil outside of the United States. There was hemming and hawing on both sides, and behind-the-scenes negotiating. Both in the U.S. and in Japan the governments were divided between war hawks who wanted fighting and the opposite.

FDR had appointed Dean Acheson as Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Relations and International Conferences. Acheson—a hothead war hawk—against FDR’s wishes, while Roosevelt was out of the country, cut off the oil supply to Japan. By the time FDR returned he refused to pull back the decision, not wanting to look “weak.” Meanwhile the U.S. was giving more and more aid to the British. And they were building up, mobilizing for potential war, using a peacetime draft, though publicly FDR continued promising no direct war involvement would occur.

But then December 7^th, 1941 happened, as FDR described it, “A day that will live in infamy.” Japan surprise-bombed a shockingly unprepared (despite being warned about Pearl Harbor being a potential Japanese target) Pearl Harbor, Hawaii for roughly two hours causing incredible damage. The planes had been sitting wingtip to wingtip, sitting ducks. The United States was in the war.

The October Surprise, 1917, towards the end of World War I, had taken down the Tsar in Russia and created the Soviet communist state under Lenin. After Lenin Stalin took power, a murderous tyrant from Georgia. Stalin managed to murder roughly some 30 million people during his reign of terror from 1929 to 1953. Originally Germany had signed a non-aggression pact with Russia. Ergo Russia had stayed out of the war; neutral. But on Sunday June 22 Operation Barbarossa went down, and the Nazis, going back on their promise, attacked Russia.

This soon drove Russia to join the Allied Powers (U.S., Britain, France). Without Russia (they lost something like 20 million men over the short course of World War II, only four years of fighting for Russia) it seems highly unlikely the Allies would have won. Or if they had it would have required much steeper American and British casualties. The Russians fought bitterly and admirably, and through the brutally cold Russian winters. Meanwhile American and British troops were fighting the Italians in Africa. France had fallen early to the Nazis in 1940. The provisional Vichy French/Nazi government was established.

FDR met many times with Winston Churchill, England’s prime minister. They became easy, fast friends. Churchill visited and stayed in the White House several times. He drank like an alcoholic but never got drunk. Eleanor found him genial but annoying. He was stately and pretentious and demanding, like a spoiled child.

The two Western leaders also, strangely, had to deal with and meet up several times with Stalin. Stalin was intelligent and witty and cunning. He was also dangerous and of course had imperialist ambitions. Poland had been taken by the Germans. Stalin wanted to overtake Poland for Russia in order to create a safe and strong Russia since historically when Russia had been attacked it’d often come through Poland. FDR and Churchill obviously didn’t like this expansionist goal. Already—as early as 1943—FDR understood that Stalin was a force to be reckoned with and that the post-war world would be tricky when being divided up between the U.S. and Russia. He grasped that Britain would be deeply in debt to the U.S. and that most major European nations would be forced to give up their colonies. The British Empire would be no more. America would rise. He also understood, by 1944, after learning in grotesque detail about the German death camps, that the Jews required their own state. Israel would be formed, eventually, out of a U.N. resolution.

The three world leaders (“The Big Three”) met in a series of conferences: Tehran, Crimea, Yalta. Between the three men they decided Germany’s fate (originally wanting to carve up the nation into dozens or even hundreds of sections, similar to pre-1880 German unification), established the notion of a War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremburg for Nazi war criminals, considered how Europe might be divided amongst the powers so that world war would never happen again, etc. Stalin agreed to attack Japan. The two Western leaders made concessions to Stalin as far as nations he planned to control. The globe was a chess board. FDR knew he only had so much power and so much influence. Stalin would do what he did. Thus by even as early as 1943 the roots of the Cold War were planted.

The war brought the United States fully out of the Depression. FDR had done much to aid the economic recovery via his New Deal legislation but things were still not doing fantastic until the war mobilization machine really got humming, circa 1942, after Pearl Harbor was bombed. Women entered the work force en masse; the men went to war. FDR created the GI bill allowing millions of returning vets to go to college. Something like only 5% of Americans went to college before World War II. The GI bill changed that, allowing for the working and middle classes to go to school. Women felt the tug of freedom in the workforce as a population for the first time. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, after FDR’s death (he died at age 63 of congestive heart failure; his declining health was very public but the seriousness of his condition [incredibly high blood pressure; seizures; strokes] was hidden and kept secret by top members of his staff who found it inconvenient) was a shock.

Roosevelt had been elected four times, leading the nation through the worst economic depression in American history, and through the second world war. He left us with social security, the FDIC, farm tax relief programs, mass rural electrification, deforestation laws, hydro-electric power, the GI Bill, in short the American social safety net. Since then, at least for the past few decades, it seems Democrats have run on this platform (add identity obsession over the past decade) and Republicans have by and large wanted to dismantle the FDR plank and social safety net. There is of course some complexity and nuance here. Not all Republicans want to dismantle New Deal-inspired regulation and social safety net laws. But it’s historically been the Republican party that has, in general, aimed at doing just that.

I think of FDR’s legislation as being somewhat similar to what happened during Covid: Massive government spending during an unprecedented historical moment. Obviously, Covid and the emergency relief spending were not handled perfectly. Far from it. Sadly, our contemporary political and historical moment is captured by identity politics, divisive racial animus on both sides, gaslighting of whole populations, mud-slinging, antisemitism, and gross ignorance largely due, in my opinion, to a sad decline of reading, a lack of civics and balanced history classes in grade and high school, a distaste on the left for freedom of speech, a fascistic shift on the Right towards book-banning and being pro-Russia, and that old familiar demon we all more or less blame and hate now (and should): Social Media.

Social media has, in my view, broken our concentration, fractured our minds, made us impetuous, petulant assholes who attack while safely behind a screen, and encourage and incentivize all of us to pretend that we’re “experts.” Both the right and the left have become profoundly anti-intellectual, stubbornly glazed within their own stupid, willful ignorance. Both sides say the other side is “fascistic” and antidemocratic. Sadly, both sides, on multiple political and cultural levels, are correct. (Though I ultimately, broadly side with Democrats, the centrists, that is, which thankfully are the majority.)

I think if there’s any lesson we can take from FDR—and there are many—it would be that the best way forward is to focus on class. If you focus on the poorest people in the nation, you’ll automatically take care of low-income urban Black Americans. Simultaneously, you’ll also help out the rural white working class voters, aka Trumpers. There are poor people of all races in America, we all know that. Millions of working-class people—often white—are dying of the horrific opioid epidemic. The boring, constant finger-pointing and “root cause” analysis gets us nowhere. People need jobs. People need houses. People need credit. People need loans. AI is destroying many low-wage jobs and this will only continue to worsen. Pitting white against Black, Asian against Black, Hispanic against Asian, etc, will never work.

Hispanic voters overwhelmingly feel that race should NOT be used in affirmative action. Ditto Asian voters. Despite Biden’s victory in 2020, his approval rating is a dismal 37%. Harris is even worse, at 33%. These are unheard of numbers. Seventy percent of Americans want a Democratic candidate other than Biden and 60% want a Republican candidate other than Trump. Chesa Boudin, the hyper-progressive former San Francisco DA got thrown out by moderate, rational Democrats because he gaslit the city and wouldn’t prosecute crime. We’re living through a moment when young angry progressives are playing with theoretical fire, playing games with society at the expense of…us. We need real leadership.

In 2016, I was enthralled, as so many other young people were (I was then 33), with Bernie Sanders. Looking back now I realize how naïve I was. He was never electable. His ideas were largely unrealistic and ridiculous. But he tapped into something important, a young populist vein which couldn’t fully be ignored. He tapped into young people’s—Millennials’—anguish and rage which had been leaking out since the start of Occupy Wallstreet circa 2012.

FDR, too, was a populist, a man who wanted a progressive wealth income tax, and who wanted to and in fact successfully did pump mass amounts of government dollars into the flagging U.S. economy. Bernie, like FDR, was bold. Trump, too, love him or hate him, was a populist, or at least presented a populist voice to the white working class. It’s worth noting that 12% of Bernie voters in the 2016 primary switched to Trump in the general.

It’s also worth noting that, in small but growing numbers, Asian, Hispanic and even Black voters have been slowly breaking off in little chunks for Trump. That should tell you something.

The fringe progressive left has lost touch with non-online reality, with the mass of American people, with commonsense and moderation. They now favor antisemitism—the biggest joke I’ve heard is lefties claiming they aren’t antisemitic they’re “just criticizing the Israeli government,” as they excuse, apologize for and/or even support Hamas, a terror group that wants to end Israel altogether and wants to kill as many Jews as possible—and identity politics, “antiracism,” which is actually racism in academic disguise. Double-speak, folks. Orwell’s dystopia is here, and it has been since 2016. Trump certainly didn’t help the cause. One form of extremism causes the other side to react. It’s a negative feedback loop. It’s probably going to last a whole generation.

What would FDR say were he here now? He’d say, There’s nothing to fear but fear itself. Or he’d tell us all to calm down, stop squabbling about each other’s skin pigmentation, start focusing on building each other up versus tearing each other down. FDR lived through two world wars, and he was indirectly and directly involved with both. He got us through the Depression. Through the second world war. He understood on a deep and profound level what suffering felt like. If he hadn’t experienced being hobbled economically, he had experienced it, for almost a quarter of a century, physically a la his Polio. He had to use a wheelchair and/or leg braces all his life, starting at almost 40.

No man is perfect. No nation is perfect. All nations have practiced violent conquest, either internally within or externally. All have practiced slavery. None have been a panacea. Because the globe is made up of nations, nations of human beings which are flawed, weak, wounded, and submissive to the vast quagmire of the human condition.

I leave you with an FDR quote: “In these days of difficulty, we Americans must and shall choose the path of social justice… the path of faith, the path of hope and the path of love toward our fellow man.”

Love. Not racial animus and division.