Traitors to Their Class
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing Traitors to Their Class By Roger Draper Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt all embodied the great political archetype of the "traitor to his class"—the aristocrat, like...
...Almost from early childhood he seemed to be enraptured by guns, shooting, killing...
...In 1920, he again emulated TR, by winning his party's nomination for the Vice Presidency, but the ticket, headed by James M. Cox, lost...
...The authors gratifyingly refrain from speculation about her sexual tastes...
...And in 1939 she wrote to a friend in Germany, "I realize quite well that there may be a need for curtailing the ascendancy of the Jewish people," objecting only that "it might have been done in a more humane way...
...Eleanor now widened her circle of friendships to include many professional women and became a feminist...
...But he showed a greater willingness to experiment, and even the exhibits at Hoover's Presidential Library admit that FDR had a better personality for a time of national disaster...
...He defined the modern role of the President, and Eleanor defined that of the First Lady...
...Notwithstanding the family's Democratic heritage, he was not sure which party to join and finally based his decision on the availability in 1910 of the Democratic nomination for a seat in the New York State Senate...
...Claes married Jannetje Samuel-Thomas, possibly the source of FDR's otherwise mystifying comment, in 1935, that "in the dim distant past" his ancestors "may have been Jews...
...After FDR died, parties in this sense began to disintegrate under the impact of TV Since the Roosevelts came from the same social circles that produced George W Bush, some final comparisons are in order...
...A man to whom everything had come easily now had to struggle in a world where everything was hard...
...Moreover, Bill Clinton was such a talented politician that I am reluctant to say his political judgment was much worse than that of FDR, who made many mistakes...
...Roosevelt thus played a major role in the first steps of the United States as a great power, and the fame he won propelled him in 1899 to the governorship of New York...
...A dissenting boss, Mark Hanna, asked, "Don't any of you realize that there's only one life between this madman and the Presidency...
...In the White House TR took up progressive causes even more aggressively, creating the Department of Labor and Commerce, financing ambitious infrastructure projects, strengthening the regulation of business under the Interstate Commerce Act, and working for laws to regulate the production of food, drugs, and meat...
...But FDR, unlike Clinton, had a strong Democratic majority in Congress, at least until 1938, and this enabled him to have an agenda: the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Public Works Administration, Social Security, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, to give only the most important examples...
...She once described the future Justice Felix Frankfurter as "an interesting little man, but very Jew...
...His descendants were Democrats...
...In 1930, a year after the start of the Great Depression, FDR was re-elected Governor...
...But FDR, write the authors, "continued to present a bright, confident face to the world...
...In 1897, TR became Assistant Secretary of the Navy and started beating the drum against Spain...
...As for "character," Roosevelt too was a philanderer, and while in the Navy Department he attempted to cover up a scandal...
...There is no sign FDR himself was anti-Semitic...
...Eleanor was TR's niece...
...FDR, whom she married in 1905, was his fifth cousin...
...He next served as a member of the U.S...
...Wilson won, and FDR asked for and received the same subcabinet post his illustrious relative had held...
...By the end of his Administration, he told a friend, his own social class saw him "as a violent and extreme radical...
...That cannot be said of ER...
...The three Roosevelts, even in betraying their class, were its paragons...
...Her relationship with FDR ceased to be intimate, but she represented him effectively in party forums and public events...
...The family, very old by American standards, traces its descent to Claes Martenszen van Rosenvelt, who came to New Amsterdam from Holland in the 1640s...
...Back in New York, he became a businessman and a prominent supporter of Governor Alfred E. Smith...
...The shy Eleanor detested politics at first...
...She was slowly pushed out of it by the need to play the political hostess and her discovery, in 1918, that FDR was having an affair...
...There has been much conjecture about what attracted FDR to this serious, plain girl...
...When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he acquitted himself well in a job that had him running the Navy's facilities, purchasing steel and coal, and directing labor relations with the civilian workers...
...Those paths "led from the confined, insular community of their elite privileged class to a commitment to progressive change...
...In 1920, having been introduced to the financier Bernard Baruch at a social gathering, she complained that "The Jew party was appalling...
...Eventually she became a strong supporter of Israel...
...Nothing in the lives of these three people is so impressive as his determination to live the way he chose...
...In 1912, as the Progressive Party candidate for President, TR ran on a Left-wing platform that called for the direct election of Senators, women's suffrage, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, the regulation of business, Social Security, and Workmen's Compensation...
...Though the United States accepted more Jewish refugees than any other country, Roosevelt appointed the anti-Semite Breckinridge Long to a position in which he, as he said himself, "put every obstacle" in their way...
...Ultimately the most liberal of the Roosevelts, Eleanor took longest to shed the mind-set of her class because she was the last to become involved in party politics—whose beneficial effect on their personalities is the strongest impression I take away from this book...
...and he showed visitors how he could drag himself upstairs, chatting away while sweat streamed down his face...
...Two years later the Democrats gave him their Presidential nomination...
...In 1876 Teddy, an insufferable prig at 17, wrote to his mother from Harvard of a new acquaintance: "It is really a relief to find someone whom I know something about as I have not the slightest idea about the families of most of my 'friends.'" People quite like himself—the mugwumps—were attempting to overthrow strongly entrenched political party machines...
...By this time, his wife (born 1884) was already a public figure...
...He had no more idea than the incumbent, Herbert Hoover, how to end the slump...
...On the other (and richer) side, Teddy's father was a Republican...
...As the authors note, "Her mindless words leave one as speechless as she herself became when she visited DP [displaced persons] camps in 1946...
...Burns has published two earlier books on FDR—Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956) and Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (1970...
...Following his election he courted New Jersey's Governor Woodrow Wilson, whom he backed for President in 1912 despite his admiration for TR...
...It was FDR who had a will of iron...
...At the outset of the Spanish-American War the next year, he resigned his post and led a volunteer cavalry regiment in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill, in Cuba...
...Yet TR, even then putting power above snobbery, joined one and in 1881 was elected to the New York State Assembly as a Republican...
...Soon thereafter FDR was struck by the polio that crippled him for life...
...Why were Franklin and Eleanor so much more effective than the next Democratic couple to spend more than one term in the White House...
...He also prosecuted monopolies...
...Bill and Hillary Clinton, though much less disciplined and more superficial than the Roosevelts, were better educated and perhaps smarter...
...Franklin (born 1882) seemed to be much less serious, his openly declared wish of emulating "cousin Theodore" a mere fantasy...
...her world was the home...
...FDR's (but not Eleanor's) civil rights record was atrocious, and his civil liberties record will always be disgraced by the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans...
...Both TR and FDR were far more experienced than Bush when they became President...
...The Three Roosevelts is a less weighty treatment that looks for explicit lessons and makes direct comparisons, including the faults of its subjects...
...TR, as the authors observe, had "an appetite for cruelty and violence...
...In polls of political scientists, he generally ranks second or third, after Lincoln, and sometimes Washington, among Chief Executives...
...A violence of language accompanied all this...
...Bush, to date, has been merely its exemplar...
...Of the book's subjects, she had by far the hardest childhood: Her loving father was an alcoholic, her mother disliked her, and both died by the time she was nine...
...FDR and Eleanor had overcome much bigger personal obstacles...
...President William McKinley was soon assassinated...
...Claes' grandsons Johannes and Jacobus sired, respectively, the TR and FDR branches of the clan...
...Nothing could have been less obvious in the childhoods of the three patricians than the paths their lives would take," notes a new collective biography, The Three Roosevelts (Atlantic Monthly Press, 678 pp., $37.50) by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn...
...Very interesting day...
...Writers & Writing Traitors to Their Class By Roger Draper Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt all embodied the great political archetype of the "traitor to his class"—the aristocrat, like Pericles or Charles Stewart Parnell, who elects to lead the popular party...
...Although he did not run for a third term in 1908, he turned against his successor, William Howard Taft...
...Civil Service Commission (1889-95) and as president of New York City's Board of Police Commissioners (1895-97...
...He joked about his condition...
...He was right...
...TR was full of bluster...
...TR had vastly more talent...
...TR's progressive policies irritated the party bosses, however, and in 1900 they got him out of the way by giving him the GOP nomination for Vice President...
...Isaac Roosevelt, on FDR's side, was a fervent patriot in the Revolution...
...Of the three prominent Roosevelts, TR was the most talented: an excellent writer, an authority on a number of subjects, and an effective President...
...FDR was a lot more successful in business...
...An entry in his diary says, "Sat near Eleanor...
...She was attracted by his gay manner and looks, apparently, but not his ambition...
...When Smith ran for President in 1928, he asked the popular Roosevelt to run for Governor to shore up his campaign in the state, and while Smith failed to carry it, FDR won...
Vol. 84 • March 2001 • No. 2
