FOR THE SURVIVAL OF DEMOCRACY
Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s
By Alonzo L. Hamby. Free Press. 492 pp. $30
They had met just once, in passing on a July night in 1918, and the 36-year-old Franklin Roosevelt had singularly failed to make a lasting impression on the 43-year-old Winston Churchill: The Englishman had long forgotten the occasion. But 16 years later, in 1934, the young man who had been assistant secretary of the Navy during the Great War had risen to the White House. Churchill, then in the early part of his time in the wilderness and earning his living by his pen, wrote a profile of President Roosevelt. Amid the crisis of the Great Depression, Churchill noted that FDR's "generous sympathy for the underdog, his intense desire for a nearer approach to social justice, place him high among the great philanthropists." With capitalism in collapse, Roosevelt was the beacon light of the democracies, Churchill said, a beacon "which as it glows the brighter may well eclipse both the lurid flames of German Nordic self-assertion and the baleful unnatural lights which are diffused from Soviet Russia."
Advertisement
This image of Roosevelt as an essential -- if not the essential -- figure in democracy's struggle to hold its own during the economic crash and its aftermath is classic Churchill, but it is also exactly the point that Alonzo L. Hamby makes in his new book on FDR and the 1930s. Given the scale and drama of World War II, Roosevelt's leadership in the tumultuous decade leading up to the war has received less popular attention in recent years, and Hamby's account is a useful refresher course on the global prologue to the war.
Share this articleShareJohn Maynard Keynes was once asked if there had ever been anything like the Great Depression before. "Yes," Keynes said. "It was called the Dark Ages, and it lasted four hundred years." Hamby's thesis is in line with Keynes's remark. He calls the Depression "the defining event of the twentieth century" and tells the story of the decade by comparing and contrasting Hitler, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, and, at center stage, Roosevelt. The author, a professor of history at Ohio University, is more interested in political leadership than in grand, impersonal historical forces. As he puts it, his book "assumes that individuals, acting within the limitations of the world in which they live, make history. Neither the New Deal nor Nazism nor 'Tory Socialism' were foreordained in their societies. They reflected the efforts of strong and capable leaders."
I happen to believe Hamby is exactly right about this, and the most interesting parts of For the Survival of Democracy are about people. The cast of characters is rich, ranging beyond FDR, Hitler, Baldwin and Chamberlain to a host of other dramatis personae, from Edward VIII to Huey Long to Hermann Goering. The star of the show, though, is FDR himself, and the president's mysterious capacity to guide the nation forward even when the cold fact of the matter was that his economic and foreign policies were not doing much good. The New Deal did not save us from a bitter late-1930s recession, and FDR's attempts to educate a broadly isolationist nation about the global nature of the totalitarian threat were largely unimpressive. This has long been a riddle at the heart of the study of Franklin Roosevelt: How did he do it? Harry Hopkins attributed his chief's love of democracy and popularity with the people -- not just in America but around the world, as Churchill's 1934 observations show -- to Roosevelt's "spiritual" quality. There was something in his manner, in that cheerful smile and thrown-back head, something in his assertion that, when faced with problems, it made the most sense to try something: to stay on the move, always aiming ahead, just as he had after being struck by paralysis in 1921.
Advertisement
Hamby closes his account with a concise intellectual history of popular political thinking in the '30s, a time that saw a revival of interest in the democratic philosophies of Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln from biographers such as Claude Bowers, Marquis James and Carl Sandburg. The idea of the primacy of the common man and of the collective wisdom of the many rather than the rule of dictators was in vogue, and this vision helped fuel Roosevelt's presidency as war approached. On Nov. 11, 1938 -- only six weeks after Munich, Hamby shrewdly notes -- Kate Smith introduced Irving Berlin's song "God Bless America." With such music playing in the background, the 1930s came to a close -- with capitalism saved, democracy in danger but, at least in Roosevelt's heart, prepared to take its stand. The American people would take longer to see what FDR saw, that the expansion of economic security at home and principled engagement abroad were linked and critical. But with his leadership -- shaped and tested in the depths of the Great Depression -- they would come to see it. Eleven years after his 1934 piece on Roosevelt, Churchill eulogized his friend in the House of Commons. Before his death, the prime minister said of Roosevelt, "in the days of peace he had broadened and stabilized the foundations of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might and glory of the great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history." It is a height we still hold, and Hamby's book suggests that the more we study Roosevelt, the more likely we are to hold it down the years. *
Jon Meacham, the managing editor of Newsweek, is the author of "Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship."
President Roosevelt
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nlaPBpr7TmqCnpZWjwXCuzqiirGdiZX11e49rZmtqX6eyr7DEs62oraNixKrAx2abnquknru6e5JumG1xlm6CboXAm5hmbJNosm6Flm%2BaZm9nmoB2hZhwaZ6bY2Q%3D