“Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom”, by Conrad Black

 

1281 pages, Public Affairs, ISBN-13: 978-1586482824

The phrase “warts and all” is said to derive from Oliver Cromwell’s instructions to the painter Sir Peter Lely, when commissioning a painting, to “Paint me as I am, warts and all”…or perhaps it was “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it”. Well, you get the idea, I trust. The reason I bring all this up is because what Conrad Black has done in Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom is written a “warts and all” biography of FDR that shows the man exactly as he was:

The patrician squire resented new money. The self-proclaimed farmer resented modern industrial capitalism. The inept speculator resented not only the successful investors but all those implicated in the culture of unrestricted and unregulated investment. And the political genius resented both his one lack of commercial genius and the people who did possess commercial genius and who he thought were fundamentally at odds with the interests of what would become the vast army of his political followers.

I mean, really, that sounds like a Republican Party attack ad circa 1930-something. But that is just one example of Black giving a description of perhaps the most significant American President of the 20^th Century – warts and all. With that said, I wish that Black had been able to read The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes (reviewed on November 12^th, 2019) but, seeing as that book was published in 2007 and Black’s biography released in 2003, that is an impossibility; if he had, then his cheerleading of the New Deal may, perhaps, have been not so strident.

But this championship of Big Government notwithstanding, Black has written one of the most gripping and engaging biographies I have ever read. There really was a great deal to admire about FDR, not least his courageous battle with polio. Within only a few weeks, he went from being a vigorous young man of 39 who, only the year before, had been nominated for the Vice Presidency to being a virtual paraplegic whose future was bleak indeed. But it was in battling this seemingly insurmountable setback that FDR first displayed his stubbornness, his character and his will to succeed against all odds. While he was deceitful with the public regarding the degree to which polio truly affected his health, Black fairly points out he still got the job done (and being duplicitous in politics is virtually mandatory). Strangely, Black is weakest in covering his subject through the Second World War (being much more forgiving his subject’s relations with that monster Stalin than I would have been), with his descriptions of the decisions made and the reasoning behind them being rather stilted, especially compared to his earlier dissections of FDR’s reasoning. Furthermore, leading commanders are shunted aside and their decisions given short shrift; like it or not, FDR was a commander-in-chief during the worst war in history, but we get precious little insight into his internal processes. Pity.

Beyond that, Black’s biography is a fairly straightforward chronological affair: his subject is born, grows, faces and triumphs over adversity and, inevitably, dies. But Black’s writing is crisp and moving and never boring; not once does he bog down in detail – and there is a lot of detail; everything that ever happened to Franklin Delano can be found in this book – nor go off on tangential side treks that have nothing to do with his central subject. And he posits a few, new ways of looking at that other central tenet of the man’s presidency, the New Deal: there were several “new deals”, rolled out at different points of his presidency as he gained power and support in the Congress and the nation at large. Or that, despite being portrayed as a traitor to his class and hostile to business, that all of his policies and programs were geared towards saving capitalism rather than subverting it; indeed, it was the large corporate interests in Germany, Italy and other European countries that backed the fascist movements that conquered the same in the mistaken hope that these strong men could be controlled, while he viewed the Soviet Union’s attempts at building a communist society as equally inimical to a free government controlled by the people (again, I would urge anyone who reads Black’s book to also read Shlaes’ for a more complete and realistic history of the New Deal…or New Deals…or whatever).

Conrad Black has made his name in redeeming unexpected characters, starting with the Québécois leader Maurice Duplessis before tackling American President Richard Nixon; in both cases he approached his subjects from unexpected, often sympathetic, angles, while throwing huge amounts of archival research at the reader. And so he does again with Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom; for anyone who was already sympathetic towards FDR they will find their faith more than justified, while anyone who looked upon the man from Hyde Park with a gimlet eye will find many things to admire and respect (even if the New Deal was in reality a failure).