History is revealing a truer picture of FDR, the president whose failures still plague us today

As the only president elected to four terms and who saw the country through two of its greatest cataclysms — the Great Depression and World War II — biographies of Franklin Roosevelt were certain to treat him as a magnificent figure of enduring accomplishment. In many respects he deserves this exalted regard: He transformed American government in fundamental ways, led the nation in the Second World War, created the building blocks for the postwar world order and left behind the durable New Deal Democratic Party coalition that dominated American politics for most of the next half-century, ending more than 70 years of Republican sway.

And academic history and the major publishers in the mid-20th century were largely populated with sympathetic liberals who easily found FDR a subject for a Whig interpretation — that is, FDR and the New Deal represented a major leap forward in the inexorable progress of human history.

By the 1950s, there began a steady stream of best-selling biographies and chronicles that bordered on hagiography.

He restored the nation’s confidence and tackled the Great Depression and then led the world to victory over totalitarianism.

The tiny handful of critical biographies were largely ignored and disappeared without a trace.

But this scene has started to change as a new generation of scholars — left, right and in-between — have begun offering more critical assessments of FDR and his legacy.

This revision has reached critical mass at a critical moment and with a large irony, as President Trump is in the midst of reversing some of the core constitutional changes FDR’s New Deal wrought — and doing so through the exercise of executive power nearly identical to how FDR wielded the power of the presidency to change the nation’s course.

One of the best critical assessments of FDR occurred while he was still in office, when one of his top political assistants, Raymond Moley, published “After Seven Years” in 1939.

Moley, a Columbia PhD economist, helped the president assemble the famous “brain trust” of liberal intellectuals and drafted some of FDR’s major speeches, including his first inaugural address.

“Tell-all” books from insiders on serving presidents is a common feature today, but Moley’s book was among the first in this genre, and his tale of disillusionment with both FDR and New Deal policy was bracing — but was overlooked and is largely forgotten today.

(Among other Moley revelations: The memorable inaugural phrase “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” apparently came from a department-store newspaper ad.)

An early critical account of FDR was John T. Flynn’s 1948 “The Roosevelt Myth.” Flynn, who had been a leader in the isolationist America First movement before World War II, produced the first themes that have loomed large in more recent revisionist histories, such as the facts FDR was the first president to realize a crisis is not a problem but a political opportunity and many of his New Deal economic policies made the Depression worse.

“Many good people in America cherish the illusion that Roosevelt performed some amazing feat of regeneration for this country,” Flynn wrote. “The figure of Roosevelt exhibited before the eyes of our people is a fiction.”

But Flynn’s powerful critique of FDR was simply overwhelmed by the cascade of major works from grandees of the liberal academy, many of them based at FDR’s alma mater, Harvard.

James MacGregor Burns’ two-volume biography, whose first installment appeared in 1956, made FDR out to be an epigone of Machiavelli’s portrait of the person able to channel the skills of “the lion and the fox.”

In Burns’ judgment, FDR was the “master politician” of his age, “a man of principle, of ideals, of faith,” possessing “political artistry” that enabled him to achieve “brilliant victories.” Burns was known for his many works on leadership, and FDR was his preeminent example.

Following hard on Burns was Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s sweeping three-volume narrative “The Age of Roosevelt” starting in 1957.

Schlesinger can be considered the partisan court historian of the Democratic Party, whose every work always seemed to find Democratic presidents (except for Jimmy Carter, whom he hated) were the very incarnation of the Hegelian world spirit.

Despite completing three compulsively readable volumes for a total of nearly 2,000 pages, Schlesinger gave up the project after only reaching the year 1936, barely one-third of FDR’s presidency, because another glittering prince, John F. Kennedy, diverted his energy and attention from then on.

Countless large biographies followed over the next several decades, usually by liberal-minded biographers, but there are a few from conservative writers who approve of FDR, such as the Canadian author Conrad Black.

His massive 2003 biography (more than 1,200 pages), “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom,” approves of the New Deal as a whole while noting some unsound specific policies and frequent “humbug” and demagoguery in FDR’s political practices. For Black, FDR was nothing less than the savior of the West.

Black is not the only conservative figure with a positive view of FDR. Winston Churchill willfully overlooked FDR’s flaws from early on, and Harvey Mansfield Jr. and Harry V. Jaffa were among the many conservative political scientists who admired FDR.

Revisionist history, based especially on a much better grasp of economics, has started to turn the tables on FDR’s record and reputation.

Milton Friedman and other economists argued persuasively that massive errors by the Federal Reserve, largely unperceived and uncorrected by the New Deal, drove a cyclical downturn into a catastrophic depression.

More recent work by economic historians has solidified the view that the New Deal’s persistent economic errors needlessly prolonged and deepened the Depression, such as Gene Smiley’s “Rethinking the Great Depression” (2002) and Jim Powell’s “FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression” (2003), to which should be added Burton Folsom’s “New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America” (2008).

Also that year, Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression” synthesized these new economic insights along with rich political history to convey FDR’s damaging “intellectual instability.”

Shlaes notes that FDR’s National Recovery Act generated 10,000 new pages of law in the US statute books, whereas the entire statute law was only 2,735 pages when FDR took office. 

Some contemporary progressives have downgraded FDR’s status as a liberal hero, noting his indifference if not hostility toward civil rights for blacks and his trampling of civil liberties culminating in the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, against the advice of his attorney general and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Somewhat muted in the secular progressive dislike of FDR today is his apparently sincere piety.

During World War II, FDR wrote a preface for an edition of the New Testament distributed to American troops: “As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.” On D-Day in 1944, FDR led the nation in prayer for our armed forces on live radio, and in his final inaugural address, in 1945, he said, “So we pray to Him for the vision to see our way clearly . . . to achievement of His will.” Today’s liberals would regard these statements and acts as grounds for impeachment.

This year has seen the arrival of three new blockbusters confirming the durability of the revisionist downgrade of FDR: Mary Grabar’s “Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths” (Regnery), George Selgin’s “False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947” (University of Chicago Press) and David Beito’s “FDR: A New Political Life” (Carus Books).