[Debunking FDR: The Man and the Myths by Mary Grabar (Regnery Publishing, 2025, xvii + 364 pp.)]
Mary Grabar—who will be remembered for her excellent demolition of the leftist icon Howard Zinn (Debunking Howard Zinn [Regnery, 2019])—has, in Debunking FDR, taken on a much more dangerous target, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most of my readers will already view him with disdain, but he is widely regarded by the mainstream Left as one of our greatest presidents, and the neocons have increasingly tended to elevate him to the pantheon, occupying a place of honor only slightly below Abraham Lincoln. Those who hold such views are liable for a shock if they read Grabar’s book with an open mind, though it is safe to predict that they will not.
Grabar challenges the common view that FDR was a traitor to his class, in that he abandoned his upper-class origins and social environment, putting aside their interests and instead sympathizing with and helping the poor and downtrodden. Grabar dissents, holding that FDR maintained throughout his life the same attitude toward the poor, and this attitude—far from breaking with his class—upheld it. This attitude was that the poor were to be “helped” by obeying the dictates of their aristocratic superiors. In arguing for this thesis, Grabar is following in the footsteps of John T. Flynn, as she recognizes, but she is able to document her interpretation with much more evidence than was available to Flynn in the 1940s and 1950s. She says:
The work of a country squire (when he was not in his private rail car on the way to a board or club meeting in the city) involved constant delegating, monitoring, and rewarding work done by others. On a national scale, work would be assigned according to abilities and needs. The “overbalance of population in our industrial centers,” as Roosevelt said in his first inaugural, would be remedied by “engaging on a national scale in a redistribution,” in an “endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.” A paternalistic federal government would take over and oversee “relief activities” and “all forms of transportation and of communication and other utilities which have a definite public character.”
From early youth, Roosevelt manifested a vindictive character, and as President he did not hesitate to use the government to harass critics such as Flynn and the acidulous journalist Westbrook Pegler:
Roosevelt called Pegler “a cad with the hide of a rhinoceros,” and, as he did with many who crossed him, had his tax returns audited. He also had choice words for New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, once he began criticizing him. . . He did not hesitate to pressure editors—even of small journals such as the Yale Review—to boycott certain writers, such as John T. Flynn.
War would provide Roosevelt with a greatly expanded opportunity to enact his paternalistic schemes. I suspect you think I have in mind World War II, but here I mean World War I, when Roosevelt’s warmongering was already evident. He had been able to secure a position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy after Woodrow Wilson took office as President in March 1913, in large part through the influence of the Secretary, Josephus Daniels, under whom Roosevelt served and whom he constantly undermined and bypassed:
Both Theodore [Roosevelt] and Franklin bristled at Wilson’s vacillation and itched to get into the war, although Theodore had at first been “uncharacteristically vague” about which side he favored. . . But “Franklin never had a moment’s doubt as to which side he favored,” writes [Geoffrey C.] Ward. Wilson’s public call for impartiality was an impossible request for FDR; “everything in his upbringing had taught him to admire the British and despise the Germans.”
Roosevelt used the war to advance his plans for economic centralization:
Desk soldier FDR got a lot of practice for his presidency. He advocated for a National Labor Administration. Although it was rejected by the Labor Department as a turf issue, it helped lead to changes that transformed the Labor Department into something close to Roosevelt’s vision. The National War Labor Board and a War Labor Policies Board would “serve as guides to Roosevelt’s dealings with labor problems. . . Looking back several years later, FDR informed a writer that organizing for war had been “from the top down, NOT the bottom up.”
So devoted to his faith in control from the top down was Roosevelt that, after becoming President, he preferred to let the country remain in economic depression because he feared that moves toward market freedom might dismantle his economic regulations:
Most historians and biographers admit that FDR did not end the Depression. Nor does it seem he wanted to. David M. Kennedy [a pro-New Deal historian] calls the Great Depression “a catastrophic economic crisis that Roosevelt failed to resolve, at least until World War II came along.” FDR had “larger purposes.” In 1937, as a second depression hit, FDR worried that economic recovery might be “politically premature.” It might “dismantle the fragile edifice of reforms he had instituted, and it might weaken the Executive Branch.’’
Grabar agrees with Kennedy’s interpretation, though she writes from a contrary political standpoint.
FDR did have “larger purposes.” He would be able to carry through his “plans,” as he described them in Troy, New York, as a young senator and lord of the manor. A time of severe recession and global conflict would present the perfect opportunity to perform his ultimate role: as Lord of the Nation.
Once he was able to enter World War II through “the back door,” by provoking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as Charles Callan Tansill has meticulously documented, Roosevelt was implacable:
Propelled by his lifelong hatred of Germans, Roosevelt ignored all entreaties for a negotiated peace. As a result, Thomas Fleming concludes, if all the dead and wounded since 1943, “when unconditional surrender was promulgated, destroying the German resistance’s hope of overthrowing Hitler,” were counted, the figure would come to eight million. “Unquestionably, this ultimatum was written in blood. The result of FDR’s wartime leadership was loss of more blood, as much of the world became dominated by communism—a cruder form of feudalism. FDR’s admiration for Stalin was natural.”
Aside from a few mentions of later events, though, Debunking FDR ends with Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency in 1932. It is to be hoped that Grabar will, in a future volume, extend her skeptical look at FDR to the rest of his life. It is sure to be a melancholy tale.
