FDR: A Biography
It is the last Sunday of the month, so it’s time for the next president, and this month is a doozy, with FDR: A Biography by Ted Morgan. So, let’s do this.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born January 30, 1882 at the family residence in Hyde Park, NY. Now FDR was born of American “royalty,” if America HAD royalty. The Delano family had initially made millions…in 19th century money, so gold backed money…in the 19th century, importing Tea from China to the United States. The family eventually lost this fortune through bad investment and the head of the Delano family, I think it was FDR’s grandfather on his mothers side, traveled back to China and made the family’s SECOND fortune importing Opium from China to the United States, JUST IN TIME for the Civil War, when opium would be at a premium treating the injuries of the wounded. I told my husband that, and he said something like “yeah, that’s about right….his family imported opium and FDR founded the CIA which would go on to import LOTS of drugs to the ghettos.”
Which is not QUITE accurate…FDR founded the OSS, which was the PRECURSOR to the CIA, but the point was valid, and it made me laugh.
On the Roosevelt side, the Roosevelts came over from Holland or the Netherlands in the early 17th century, owned lots of land in the New Amsterdam area, and just barely missed making a fortune by an early sale of land to….I forget who, but it’s whoever purchased the land from the Roosevelt clan that would eventually become Manhattan…aka the richest piece of real estate in the country. Like….5th avenue real estate.
FDR was the fifth cousin of Theodore Roosevelt and was very impressed by the family history and was a great admirer of Teddy. Now, his mother, Sara, was the picture of the Oedipal, devouring mother. Like seriously…she wanted to keep her baby boy close and at home always, and he had to fight her to get out of the dresses, which were the normal clothing for all children in the 19th century, into regular boys’ clothes. His father, James Roosevelt, was 54 to his mother’s 26, not unusual for that time, and James had basically been semi-retired since inheriting his fortune from his father.
Having fought to get away from his mother’s controlling grasp, when he was 14 FDR was enrolled in Groton boarding school, and he flourished there. After Groton he went to Harvard, and then law school. He married Eleanor, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s niece, on March 17, 1905.
Poor fucking Eleanor…Sara was controlling and domineering, building them a family home in New York that was basically a duplex. Which sounds great. Until you learn that there were sliding walls that would let them join rooms and literally enter each other’s residences at a moment’s notice.
And since he caught the Civil Service bug from his mentor at Groton, school founder Endicott Peabody, FDR chose pretty early to go into public service, meaning he did not have the funding to support the lifestyle he wanted and was used to. But his mother did…and she used that to force her way on everything.
Now, FDR entered civil service pretty early, he did take the NY Bar, but was quickly tapped to act as state senator, representing the upper NY district in the state capital from 1910 to 1913. When Wilson won the presidency in 1912, FDR was tapped to be the assistant secretary of Navy. Here’s where life gets interesting.
So, when he was State Senator, he was kind of a snot, haughty and condescending…at least that’s how Frances Perkins remembers him. Frances Perkins would eventually join his cabinet as Secretary of Labor, but when they first met, he declined to assist her in getting state legislation passed that would limit women working more than 54 hours in a week…yeah, he didn’t care about labor until he could benefit from labors votes. Didn’t care about women’s issues until women got the vote in 1920 with the passage of the 19th amendment.
Back to the Asst Secretary of the Navy…he was a pain in the ass to work with, thought that the Secretary of the Navy under Wilson’s SECNAV, Josephus Daniels, was incompetent, and that work only got done when he was the one doing it. Daniels, for his part, indulged FDR! Thought he was an exuberant young man with high spirits. FDR….he was always high handed and awful, although the author seems to think he was demonstrating leadership potential. Or maybe not. One thing to admire in this book is that the author is pretty unflinching in reporting FDR’s fuck ups and high handedness.
Like when FDR used his position as Asst SECNAV to order the Navy to pick his children up from the family residence in upper NY so they could avoid public transport and thus the rampant polio epidemic that was gripping the nation at that point in time. Just one example of FDR using connections the average American did not, purely for his own advantage.
Of those children…he had six total, one died in infancy, five made it to adulthood, but were a colossal mess. Like, none of them had any marriages that lasted, all were divorced at least once. His oldest daughter Anna, her second husband is known to have molested her teenage daughter by her first marriage….all of that was in the book. After the birth of their sixth children, Eleanor, who was very Victorian, refused to have sex anymore. She did not want any more children and declined to explore any other methods of birth control beyond abstinence. Important note: hormonal birth control was not yet a thing, but rubber condoms had been around since 1860. And since the Roosevelts were not Catholic, there was no reason not to use them. It is widely believed that Eleanor simply did not care for sex. It’s also possible that FDR was just bad at it. However,…following her refusal to join the marital bed again, FDR had several documented affairs, the two most well known were with Lucy Mercer, later Rutherford, and Marguerite “Missy” Lehand.
Mercer was initially Eleanor’s social secretary, and Eleanor found out about the affair when FDR returned from the front during WWI. Not that he was actively serving, but he toured the front during his time as Asst SECNAV, contracting the Spanish Flu….the big one that killed millions of people…on his return trip. While he was convalescing at home, Eleanor was unpacking his luggage and found a packet of love letters between Mercer and FDR. Divorce was discussed, but Sara…FDR’s MOTHER….was against divorce. Promised to withhold funds from FDR if he proceeded with divorce. I don’t remember what she used to induce Eleanor to stay, but stay she did. It was probably money. Mama Sara used her power of the purse strings to control all the family members, from FDR through all five grandchildren, including Eleanor.
Some of the most telling pieces of FDR were revealed during the authors discussions of FDR’s interactions with his mother. Like his skill in lying…totally developed by trying to sidestep his mother’s edicts.
Eleanor insisted that FDR never see Mercer again, which sort of happened. Mercer eventually married Winthrop Rutherford, but pretty much remained in love with FDR, and was with him when he died in 1945. But they didn’t have any real contact until April 1945. We’ll come back to that.
Lehand was his longest lasting affair and she was with FDR from 1921 until she experienced a stroke and was medically retired in June 1941…so basically right after Mercer was out, Lehand was in, and FDR’s sex life was only really down when he was actively fighting polio.
Following his bout with the flu, FDR became embroiled in one of the biggest, most South Park sounding scandals….so check this out.
The Navy Dept in Newport, RI started fielding reports that naval personnel were engaging in homosexual activity. Now…these days that’s a big nothing burger. But 100 years ago, this was a career killer and criminal activity. Yes…being gay could literally land you in prison. So, FDR approved…I kid you not…he approved naval personnel actively engaging in gay activities…to catch other people being gay. Like, signed memos and orders authorizing these activities. And when the sailors did catch other gay sailors, by allowing those sailors to give them blow jobs and….other activities….I swear I feel like I’m blushing talking about this…
Whew. Ok, so when this came out in court. Yes, there was court action on this, it eventually went before a Senate Subcommittee, and FDR was called to task to explain why he authorized gay activities that were immoral and perverse, to catch people engaging in gay activities. FDR tried to deny it, saying he had no interest in HOW the Navy got results, only that they get results. Ultimately, the Senate Subcommittee determined that FDR’s conduct was dishonorable, and that he had abused the authority of his high office.
Following this smackdown from the Senate, FDR went on vacation in the Palisades of New York, swimming with the Boy Scouts, fishing from his yacht, when he fell overboard and his back started aching. He thought he must have just injured it when he fell off the boat. He did not. This was the first stage of polio.
Now look…I still don’t life FDR after reading this book. But I can admire the absolute strength and determination it took to come back from a life altering diagnosis like Polio. In kids, it was terrifying, causing death and life long illness. In a full grown adult, with a fully formed immune system, paralysis was only a 1% chance. FDR was that 1%. The paralysis initially went halfway up his abdomen, which was exceptionally dangerous as it could have paralyzed his lungs and diaphragm, although it did eventually recede, leaving him with fully functioning everything…including sex….leaving him with damaged legs.
In the intervening 7 years, so from 1921 until 1928, FDR spent that time recuperating and trying to get back the use of his legs, spending a good chunk of that time sailing in the Bahamas and enjoying Rum Swizzles…which were legal in the Bahamas because the Bahamas did not have prohibition. When he got tired of sailing the Bahamas, he went to Warm Springs, GA to a treatment center there, and found it so therapeutic that when the original owner died, he bought it and turned it into a polio rehabilitation center.
And he spent the time working his way back into politics, eventually becoming governor of New York in 1928. Now, there was a lot of back door politicking there, and he had to learn to play nice with Tammany Hall in the interim, and when he WON governor, the former governor Al Smith tried to wiggle his way in as governor in reality with FDR only as a figure head, but FDR rejected that proposition and was governor for four years, winning his second term in 1930, before running for president in 1932.
Now, I don’t want to spend too much time going over 1932 to 1940, since I’ve covered that a lot this last month, so let’s jump into his last two terms.
By 1940, WWII had started in Europe, and the eastern front against Russia was heating up. FDR was not, per se, a fan of communism. And while the books by Shlaes and McElvaine both made it seem like one of his great saving graces is that he hated the Nazis; THIS book makes it clear that he really just hated Germans. Like, he learned at his parents knees that German’s were dirty sub humans, and he did not like Germany or Germans in general. When he and Eleanor honeymooned in Europe, including Germany, they were typically bad, like 21st century bad, rude American’s. At one of the hotels they stayed at there was a sign to please not slam the doors, and they would deliberately slam the doors because they thought it was funny. So yeah, he didn’t NOT like fascism. He hated Germans.
He hated Jews, he hated black people, he hated European power. One of his stated goals, which he managed quite ably during his talks with Stalin, was to break European colonial power. He had seen Europe draw the planet into two world wars, he didn’t want them to have enough power to do it a third time. Ok, sure…admirable goal. Instead, let’s leave the only two powers, i.e. The United States, and the Soviet Union, to fight proxy wars in third world countries. As long as it’s not fought in first world Europe, or in America or Russia….who cares? We’ll circle back to THAT too.
While president, he became the first president to use both the FBI and the IRS to take out political enemies…and to help friends. He ordered J Edgar Hoover to spy on communists and fascists in the United States…which was well outside the charter of the FBI. Unless it was referred to them by the Department of State, which FDR made them refer the matter. He authorized illegal wire tapping against political opponents and when he interned the Japanese in California following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he ignored Hoover’s advice that this was not necessary. J. Edgar Hoover…the boogey man of the FBI…said that interning the Japanese Americans was completely unnecessary…off of information obtained through illegal wire taps.
He used the IRS to target Moe Annenberg. Annenberg was the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper that was critical of FDR’s policies and Annenberg was planning on filing a libel suit against Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and that if Ickes spoke at a planned rally in Philadelphia, Annenberg would “get” him. This was read as intending bodily harm. Except there was no evidence of this. So FDR used the IRS to track down alleged gambling income for Annenberg in the amount of $6 million, resulting in Annenberg being jailed for tax evasion. He served 2/3 of his sentence before being released on compassionate leave about two weeks before he died of a brain tumor.
On the other side of the coin, he ordered the IRS to stop pursuing criminal investigation and accept the delinquent payment for an up and coming young democrat from the state of Texas, one Lyndon B Johnson. Johnson had run in the 1941 Senate race and found some creative bookkeeping ways around violations of the Hatch Act. A criminal prosecution, if he had found guilty, would have precluded him from running for public office in the future. FDR shielded him from that.
Now one thing that was informative and a pretty good defense of FDR, is the belief that he knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen and did nothing to prevent it. Morgan does a good job dispelling that myth, and I agree with the logic he laid out explaining why that wasn’t so.
Ok, this review has gone on for six pages, and there is a LOT of information in the book on FDR, so let me try and wind this up.
FDR had two in person conferences with Churchill AND Stalin. He had many face to face interactions with Churchill, but Stalin basically refused to leave his overarching fiefdom during the height of the fighting, so the first meeting was in Teheran, the second was in Yalta. During both, the carving up of territories occurred, and FDR was all on board. At the Yalta conference, which occurred in February 1945, it was widely observed that FDR was ill. He looked ill. Churchill’s doctor took one look and commented that FDR was not long for the world.
His illness had been known for awhile. Running for the third term was unprecedented. By the time he ran for the fourth term, the democratic party knew he likely would not make it through the whole term, and hand picked Harry Truman to be his running mate and the man to take over when FDR passed. After he returned from Yalta, he signed a few bills, then went to Warm Springs, GA for a respite. While there, his first mistress, Lucy Rutherford, nee Mercer, came for a visit, and brought with her a portraitist, since Lucy wanted a portrait of FDR for herself. While sitting for the portrait, FDR complained of a vicious headache before collapsing of a cerebral hemorrhage. Stalin believed FDR had been assassinated via poison, and the closed casket funeral did not help that impression. Closed casket because his face was literally purple from all the blood that had leaked under his skin from the hemorrhage. Eleanor, who had stuck by him even after the affair, was quite hurt that the other woman was present when he died.
FDR was a complicated man. I think there is a bit to admire about him. Polio in the prime of life is, by any metric, an earth-shattering diagnosis. And he came back from that. He found a way to do more with his life. He turned his polio diagnosis into a way to connect with people.
On the other hand, I think he was a megalomaniac. The choice to run for a third term was strictly a power grab, a bucking of tradition and history. And he was a hypocrite. He spent all of the 1930’s denigrating and shaming business men. But once WWII happened and he NEEDED that manufacturing capability, he was all about making connections with business to get the war machine revved up. When he met with the major manufacturers, all but one were Republicans. That one, and I don’t recall his name, while a Democrat….had voted for Republican Willkie in the 1940 election.
FDR had managed to drive a wedge into the heart of America, and managed to profit from both sides of the divide. He ran this country like a small fiefdom, using executive orders to run the country and the FBI and the IRS as his own police force to attack political enemies and grant amnesty to his allies. I don’t doubt he was a great man who did great things. But the long lasting implications…
No, war has not been fought in Western Europe since the end of WWII. But the eastern bloc was left an absolute mess. Proxy wars have been fought between the two remaining superpowers, America and Russia, in the intervening years, ending with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 to like 1992…and leaving enough bodies in the wake of the mess that on September 11, 2001, America was attacked using suicide bombers flying planes into our buildings, resulting in over 3000 American casualties. THAT action can be traced, historically, to FDR’s willingness to look the other way in the face of Stalin’s actions in Russia. If we had not fought one of those proxy wars in Afghanistan…then 9/11 would not have happened.
This was NOT a case of picking the lesser of two evils. And Roosevelt knew…he had to know. Following the liberation of POW camps in Germany, American POW’s were not released back to America. They were transferred to RUSSIAN POW camps, where word of what was happening absolutely reached FDR before his death. So he knew. He just didn’t care. Because he was all about maintaining his own power base. At the cost of we the people.
Overall this book was quite well written, while I get the sense the author genuinely admired FDR, he also does not sugarcoat the mans failings, and there is some very not PC language in the book…I mean, it wasn’t even PC for when the book was written, which was 1985. But I very much admire the author’s ability to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…even when it was less than flattering to his subject matter.
