Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (165 page)

A short while later reporters saw her leave the White House. “Mrs. Roosevelt’s tall figure was erect, and her step did not falter,” one of them wrote. “A trouper to the last,” another remarked.

A
S SOON AS
Roosevelt was stricken that afternoon, Lucy Rutherfurd knew she had to get away from Warm Springs at once. A presidential collapse—still more a presidential death, should it come to that—would be huge news. A first question reporters would ask would be who was with the president that day. People around Roosevelt had been covering up for her—and for him—for years. She didn’t want to make their task any more difficult.

She quickly gathered her things and drove off. She was back in Aiken before Eleanor arrived in Warm Springs from Washington. Whether Eleanor had an inkling that all wasn’t as it seemed or whether she simply asked what the reporters were asking, Laura Delano couldn’t lie to her cousin’s widow. She said that Lucy had been with the president in Warm Springs. She went on to say that Lucy had seen the president several times in Washington, with Anna’s assistance.

The revelation was numbing. Eleanor had been preparing herself for bad news since the war began. “I had schooled myself to believe that some or all of my sons might be killed, and I had long faced the fact that Franklin might be killed or die at any time.” But she admitted, in her memoirs, that this grim anticipation didn’t explain what she felt now. She didn’t mention Lucy by name, but those who knew of the relationship could read between the lines of what Eleanor did write.

Perhaps it was that much further back I had had to face certain difficulties until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is…. You cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be. All human beings have failings; all human beings have temptations and stresses. Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings, but they also come to know what is worthy of respect and admiration in those they live with and in themselves.

If at the end one can say: “This man used to the limit the powers that God granted him; he was worthy of love and respect and of the sacrifices of many people, made in order that he might achieve what he deemed to be his task,” then that life has been lived well and there are no regrets.

R
OOSEVELT HAD
planned to go to San Francisco; instead he went home. A military contingent from Fort Benning drove to Warm Springs to salute the deceased president and escort the body to the train station. As the flag-draped casket made its way down Pine Mountain, old-timers wept while the younger staff and neighbors stared in somber silence. The funeral train pulled out of the station before noon, commencing the slow journey north.

Across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, mourners lined the route. Men and women, grandparents and toddlers, white and black, waited in daylight and in the dark to pay their respects to the only president the younger ones had ever known, the president who had made them all feel that the government of their country cared for them. He had given them reassurance during the most frightening phase of the depression, and confidence during the most trying days of the war.

It had been a remarkable accomplishment, reflecting a unique bond between the president and the American people. They put their faith in Roosevelt because
he
put
his
faith in
them.
He believed in democracy—in the capacity of ordinary Americans, exercising their collective judgment, to address the ills that afflicted their society. He refused to rely on the invisible hand of the marketplace, for the compelling reason that during his lifetime the invisible hand had wreaked very visible havoc on millions of unoffending Americans. He refused to accept that government invariably bungled whatever it attempted, and his refusal inspired government efforts that had a tremendous positive effect on millions of marginal farmers, furloughed workers, and struggling merchants—the very people who now lined his train route north.

Did he get everything right? By no means, and he never claimed he did. But he got a great deal right. He caught the banking system in free fall and guided it to a soft landing. He sponsored rules that helped prevent a recurrence of the banking collapse and of the stock market crash that preceded it. The programs his administration formulated furnished jobs and experience to much of a generation of young people. He helped the parents of these young people keep their homes and farms. He showed their grandparents that old age need not be accompanied by poverty. He gave workers a hand in their efforts to rebalance relations between labor and capital.

Beyond everything else, he provided hope. He didn’t end the Great Depression, which was too large and complex for any elected official to conquer. But he banished the despair the depression had engendered. He understood intuitively—or perhaps he learned from Uncle Ted and Woodrow Wilson—that the presidency is above all a moral office. A president who speaks to the hopes and dreams of the people can change the nation. Roosevelt did speak to the people’s hopes and dreams, and together they changed America.

They changed the world as well. Just as he trusted democracy to reach the right decisions regarding America, so he trusted democracy to reach the right decisions about the rest of the planet, if perhaps more slowly. He concluded, long before most other Americans did, that the United States must take responsibility for the defeat of international aggression. Yet he understood that he was merely president, not a czar, and that until Americans came to share his view any efforts to intervene in the struggles unfolding in Europe and Asia would be worse than wasted. He patiently, and sometimes deceptively, guided American opinion, through public statements and carefully measured actions, until the leader became the led and the country demanded what he had wanted—what he knew the country needed—all along.

His performance during the war was no more perfect than his New Deal policies had been. The fiasco of Pearl Harbor was neither a crime nor a conspiracy, but it was a fiasco nonetheless. The insufficient coordination of America’s war production impeded the efforts of the armies of the Grand Alliance. The repeated delays in opening the second front antagonized the Russians and perhaps prolonged the war.

But even more than in domestic matters, he got the big issues right. He held the alliance together. Contemporaries and historians often credited Hitler with providing the cement that kept Americans, British, and Russians working in concert. That assessment wasn’t wrong, but it was incomplete. Without Roosevelt to mediate between Churchill and Stalin, to dole out American supplies in sufficient quantities to keep the British and Russians fighting, the alliance might have splintered before the Axis did. Did Stalin trust Roosevelt? Probably not; the Soviet dictator hadn’t gotten to where he was by trusting others. But the more important question was whether he trusted Roosevelt’s judgment—Roosevelt’s judgment of the degree to which American and Russian interests coincided during the war and would continue to coincide after the war. The evidence suggests that Stalin did trust Roosevelt’s judgment. He tolerated the backsliding on the second front, and he had little difficulty coming to terms with the president on the fate of Germany.

Did Roosevelt trust Stalin? Probably more than the reverse. But if the president was less cynical than the Soviet strongman, he was no less pragmatic. He understood that Russia could insist on controlling Poland and that there wasn’t much he could do about it—because there wasn’t much the American people were willing to do about it. Had Roosevelt lived, he would have been obliged to lay out the facts of great-power life to the Poles and their American partisans. Had he lived, he would have had to manage the inevitable loosening of bonds among the Grand Allies. He would have had to face the emotional exhaustion that follows every great sacrifice and the fiscal tightening required to bring means and ends more closely into alignment. He didn’t choose the moment of his death, but had he scripted this part of his performance he couldn’t have timed his exit better. He left on a high note, before the predictable discord set in.

O
THERS HAD EXITED
before he did; some stayed longer. Louis Howe, of course, was nearly a decade dead. Missy LeHand had died in the summer of 1944. Harry Hopkins succumbed to cancer the day before what would have been Roosevelt’s sixty-fourth birthday, in 1946. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd died of leukemia in 1948.

Eleanor Roosevelt found her release from the White House personally liberating. Or perhaps it was her release from her marriage, which had constrained her even as her relationship to Franklin provided her a platform she never could have acquired on her own. But by 1945 she held that platform in her own right, and she spent the next seventeen years putting it to good use. She served as an American delegate to the United Nations General Assembly and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which embodied much of what was noble and more than a little of what was unrealistic in her view of the world. She supported Adlai Stevenson in his two unsuccessful campaigns for president. She continued writing and speaking, and prodded the conscience of America far into her eighth decade. “She would rather light a candle than curse the darkness,” Stevenson said upon her death in 1962. “And her glow has warmed the world.”

B
Y THE TIME
she died, the New Deal was almost thirty years old. In its maturity it exercised a hold on American life that would have gratified Roosevelt and appalled his opponents, including those angry, fearful types who had denounced him as a traitor to his class. Its power and durability owed much to a quirk of fate—a large quirk but one unconnected to American domestic politics and policy. If not for the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt would not have run for a third term. If he had not run, the Republicans, campaigning on his second-term troubles, and on his larger failure to restore prosperity, probably would have seized the White House. And they surely would have begun dismantling major parts of the New Deal. The protections to labor would have been vulnerable to a management-friendly executive. The constraints on banks and the stock market would have yielded to the same groups that had resisted them in the first place. Social Security, the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s reforms, might have been particularly vulnerable, in that at the end of Roosevelt’s second term it had scarcely begun to pay out anything to the great majority of its contributors. For most taxpayers, Social Security as of 1940 was simply a drain on their pocketbooks.