RESTLESS ROOSEVELT

HOFSTADTER, RICHARD

Restless Roosevelt The Democratic Roosevelt, by Rexford G. Tugwell. Doubleday. 712 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by Richard Hofstadter A BIOGRAPHY of Franklin D. Roosevelt by his former lieutenant, Rexford...

...Tugwell is more than merely interested in his subject: he is absorbed with a kind of intensity which makes every turn in Roosevelt's life, from the time of his earliest childhood consciousness, the object of minute examination, generous speculation, and sometimes almost casuistical analysis...
...It will not do," the author writes, "to leave the impression that all those who knew him believed him to be the product of a goody-goody education . . . There was much that Was worthy of praise...
...It has, as well, some priceless asides in the way of marginal information— for instance, Tugwell recalls Roosevelt's characterization, even before the 1932 campaign, of Huey Long and Douglas MacArthur as "the two most dangerous men in the country...
...Tugwell has written the book, he says, in "the hope of interesting a new generation in the one man to whom no one in my generation was indifferent...
...The most valuable thing about Tugwell's book is that it sets forth a complete interpretation of Roosevelt's mind and personality in the context of his public leadership...
...For historians it is ah indispensable document...
...We learn also that Roosevelt was restless almost from the beginning with the Democratic Party as an agency of reform, that even while still in Albany he predicted that after eight years in Washington "there may not be a Democratic Party, but there will be a Progressive one," and we are reminded of Rosenman's report that early in 1944 Roosevelt approached Willkie with the proposal that they join forces in creating a liberal coalition, apparently to transform the Democratic Party...
...But to those who do have vivid recollections of those decades, and for whom Tugwell's concerns are not abstract intellectual propositions but the living substance of reality, this book must inevitably have the greatest fascination...
...But this speech, delivered late in September, in which he outlined a philosophy of American development, was considered by many observers to be a high point in the campaign because of the conception of American economic maturity it accepted and the kind of consolidation and central management it seemed to suggest...
...He was much more an optimist than he appeared to be in that speech...
...For those, like the reviewer, whose views of Roosevelt have been affected in some measure by Moley's work, however much discounted, Tugwell's book comes as a counterpoise of great value...
...All the rest of their lives would be lived in the past...
...It is precise-, ly this young audience (which sometimes, as a teacher, I find quite incapable of understanding in any satisfactory way the realities of the depression experience), that Tugwell may not be able to reach...
...In many ways this striking biography is a work of resurrection, by one to whom all the details of the past are of the utmost importance...
...It was written," Tugwell reports, "by Adolph Berle with some assistance from me, although it was not altogether congenial, so far as I was concerned...
...Some of the information comes as a distinct surprise, notably Tugwell's version of the famous Commonwealth Club speech of 1932...
...The book is written with deep affection, but it is not uncritical...
...It is a long book, and I wonder whether it may not seem something of a curiosity to those of its readers who cannot themselves remember the New Deal era and the war...
...Although Tugwell can be critical, he is always loyal, and he is still shocked by the defection of his fellow Brain Truster, Raymond Moley, whose book, After Seven Years ("one of the crudest books I know of") he feels is no more than a "deliberately shallow caricature...
...there were some things to be explored...
...nor, as I thought, was it an accurate representation of Franklin's attitude...
...there were some disastrous decisions...
...It is this very restlessness that stands out in Tugwell's book...
...Reviewed by Richard Hofstadter A BIOGRAPHY of Franklin D. Roosevelt by his former lieutenant, Rexford Guy Tugwell, is inevitably a personal document and a book of reminiscence...
...Tugwell reports Roosevelt's eager question as to who wrote Churchill's speeches and his somewhat wistful envy when he was told that Churchill wrote them himself...
...But now we are told by Tugwell (for the first time by anyone, to my knowledge) that F.D.R...
...Those who think of Roosevelt as a calm and self-satisfied master, riding the political tides, will be arrested by Tugwell's conviction that the President was deeply troubled by his ins ability to use the Democratic Party and the apparatus of American poll-tics to bring more substantial recovi ery and more satisfactory reform What we are presented with, from the time of the Supreme Court fight onward, is an atmosphere not of confident mastery, but of anguished twistings and turnings to break out of a situation whose confinements Roosevelt found all but intolerable...
...For more than all the books that have yet been -written about Roosevelt, Tugwell's is one whose every line is redolent of the concerns of the twenties, thirties, and forties...
...Speaking of those of Roosevelt's friends and co-workers who gathered in the pale April sunshine at the new grave—among them Steve Early, Sam Rosenman, Harry Hopkins, Ross Mclntire, and Ed Flynn—Tugwell remarks: "All these loyal helpers buried a good part of themselves that day...
...The meaning of the Roosevelt era for those who, like Tugwell, were actively identified with the rise and reign of the democratic Roosevelt is suggested by a sentence in Tugwell's moving account of the President's death and burial...
...but there was nothing of inconsequence and nothing we ought not to tell about because it does not fit the stereotype of statesmanship...
...Roosevelt was, of course, under much criticism in 1932 for the vagueness of his campaign commitments...
...had no chance to see or revise the Commonwealth Club speech before it was delivered...
...Behind Roosevelt's buoyancy, which Tugwell never fails to acknowledge, there appears a more genuinely tragic figure than many, even among Roosevelt's admirers, have been able to see...

Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12


 
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