A History Lesson: FDR

I'm reading the book in my sig line -- Alter's book on FDR's first 100 days. It's fascinating.

FDR was considered a lightweight without deep progressive credentials. He was wealthy growing up, but not super-wealthy. When he met Eleanor, she was volunteering with an organization that helped poor Jewish immigrants and he would go with her on her rounds. He'd go into people's homes in the lower East Side and he was shocked that people actually lived like that. Those experiences contributed to his political philosophy.

He came up in New York politics as an anti-Tammany (anti-corruption) politician. As a (first-term, I believe) state senator, he got the NY delegation behind Wilson, who was not Tammany's candidate for president. When Wilson won, his reward was an undersecretary position in the Dept of the Navy (the same position his second cousin held). There wasn't a single labor strike in the Navy shipyards during this period, which was unusual. Once Wilson was gone, Roosevelt was out and his political career seemed to be dead.

Al Smith (who was supported by Tammany Hall) took up all the air in NY politics, and the only way that Roosevelt was able to get some breathing room was because Smith ran for president and lost in '28. FDR used the opportunity to run for governor and win in '28 and get reelected in '30.

Smith was still the de facto head of the national democratic party during this time. Smith had built his career on being a progressive politician deeply concerned with the rights of working people. However, he lost the presidential race because of anti-catholicism and he decided that the best way to counter that was to cultivate big business and to make being against prohibition the central issue in his '32 campaign for president.

FDR, on the other hand, thought that the economy was the central issue in the '32 race and built his campaign on the idea that the economy does the best when the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid are the strongest. Al Smith called this class warfare. He said that he believed that the economy did the best when the benefits conferred on the people at the top leaked down to the people on the bottom.

So, Al Smith, Democratic nominee for president in '28, putative head of the Democratic Party in '32, INVENTED the class warfare criticism of Democrats and the "trickle down" theory of economics that Reagan later made famous. And this was during the Depression when Democrats should have known better. At the Democratic convention, Smith's speech was about Prohibition. His delegates sang "How Dry I Am" at the end of it. Again, at a time like that in American history, it's amazing that a Democrat leading the party wanted to build a '32 campaign around making sure more people could legally drink.

Man! Talk about crazy priorities.

America is incredibly lucky that FDR won in '32.

...they were wealthy men whose consciences and concern for ALL Americans, rich or poor, drove them into public service. Another wealthy man who did the same was JFK.

Perhaps if Smith hadn't been catholic, he could have been president and fought for working people -- he only embraced big business and anti-Prohibition because he saw it as his only chance for the presidency. Smith was an orphan who didn't go to college, so American could have had its working class hero if not for anti-catholic bigotry.

But, then again, Smith derived his power from the political patronage machine, which was corrupt on many levels, and it would still take a politician with charisma, who could directly appeal to the people, to circumvent corrupt institutions, and FDR and JFK were politicians who could do that, and they did it regardless of their names and their families (but, of course, their names and the confidence of wealth helped).

Incidentally, when FDR was Undersec of the Navy, Joe Kennedy came to him, when he was the manager of a boatyard in Mass, and told him that he wasn't going to deliver a ship he built to the Argentine Navy unless he got paid first. FDR told Kennedy that there was a war going on and Argentina was our ally, and he ordered the US Marines to take possession of the boat and deliver it to the Argentine navy which was waiting off shore. Kennedy cried when he saw that.

FDR had Clinton's political savvy, Carter's selflessness, and Reagan's "avuncularity", all in one. America, Germany, and Japan all went into depression in the mid-late 1920s. America flirted with extremism, but eventually chose the right path - FDR, I believe, was an important part of this process.

happen other than the fact that FDR was president.