Product Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A Washington Post Notable Book

A brilliant evocation of the qualities that made FDR one of the most beloved and greatest of American presidents.

Drawing on archival material, public speeches, correspondence and accounts by those closest to Roosevelt early in his career and during his presidency, H. W. Brands shows how Roosevelt transformed American government during the Depression with his New Deal legislation, and carefully managed the country's prelude to war. Brands shows how Roosevelt's friendship and regard for Winston Churchill helped to forge one of the greatest alliances in history, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin maneuvered to defeat
Germany and prepare for post-war Europe.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9431 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-08
• Released on: 2009-09-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 912 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307277947
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: With Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, H.W. Brands penetrates the clenched grin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a masterful biography of one of America's most beloved leaders. Though born into the upper crust of society, FDR dedicated his career to fighting for the common good and the ideals of the American Dream. With the same exhaustive research familiar to fans of his biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, Brands provides a portrait of an unflinching (and often recalcitrant) figure whose unshakable confidence inspired a beleaguered nation. FDR's path may have been unorthodox (evidenced by an unprecedented 12 years spent as commander-in-chief) and arguably illegal (the New Deal didn't always work well with the Constitution), but his shared goal of a stronger America at home and abroad endeared him to voters of varying backgrounds. "We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country's interest and concern," proclaimed Roosevelt in 1937. "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." -- -Dave Callanan

From Publishers Weekly
It is unfortunate for University of Texas historian Brands (Andrew Jackson) that his serviceable biography of Franklin Roosevelt comes on the heels of Jean Smith's magisterial Francis Parkman Prize winner, FDR (2007). Still, Brands provides an entirely adequate narrative detailing the well-known facts of Roosevelt's life. We have the young Knickerbocker aristocrat somewhat tentatively entering the dog-eat-dog world of local Democratic politics in New York's Hudson Valley. We have him embarking on a marriage with his cousin Eleanor that was fated to be politically successful but personally disastrous. We also have the somewhat spoiled son of privilege facing the first real battle of his life—polio—and emerging with greatly enhanced fortitude and empathy. Appropriately, Brands gives two-thirds of his book to FDR's presidency and its two most dramatic events: the domestic war against devastating economic depression (fought with tools that many in America's upper classes considered socialist), and the international war against Axis power aggression. It is fitting that Roosevelt commands the amount of scholarly attention that he does, but sad that so much is wholly redundant with what has come before. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Lynne Olson When Rexford Tugwell first met New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, he observed to a Columbia University colleague, Raymond Moley, how expressive Roosevelt's face was: "It might have been an actor's." Moley -- who, like Tugwell, later served as a key member of FDR's presidential brain trust -- replied that, in fact, the governor's face was an actor's, "and a professional actor's at that. . . . It was a lifetime part that he was playing. . . . He'd figured out what he ought to be like in order to get where he wanted to get and do what he wanted to do, and that was what was on display." No one, Moley added, "would ever see anything else." The longest-serving president in U.S. history, Roosevelt was arguably the most inscrutable. He kept no diary, wrote no autobiography and unburdened himself to no one. Even his wife had no idea what was on his mind; in a letter to him, Eleanor Roosevelt exploded in frustration: "I wish I knew what you really thought & really wanted." As H.W. Brands writes in Traitor to His Class, a hefty new biography of Roosevelt, he "gave nothing away." Brands, a professor of history and government at the University of Texas who has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, offers few new facts about Roosevelt's life or the complexities of his character. What he does do -- and does well -- is to explain in detail how this ambitious Hudson Valley patrician, the coddled son of an elderly father and dominating mother, managed to defy his family and social class and become the most reform-minded president in U.S. history. The best part of Brands's book is his vivid account of FDR's early life and pre-presidential career. At the age of 25, Roosevelt, a Columbia Law School dropout, laid out his blueprint for attaining the presidency: a seat in the New York State Assembly, appointment as assistant secretary of the Navy and election as governor of New York. That was precisely the career path of his distant cousin and role model, President Theodore Roosevelt, whose niece he had wed three years earlier. By most accounts, Franklin married for love, but the fact that his wife was a close relation of the president, as Brands notes, certainly "didn't diminish her appeal." This charismatic, calculating young "man on the make" had already achieved two of the jobs on his "to do" list -- assemblyman and assistant navy secretary -- when in 1921 he contracted polio and his charmed life came to an abrupt, if temporary, halt. Roosevelt's courageous battle against the disease was the defining moment of his personal and political life. As Brands writes, his involvement with the residents of Warm Springs, the rural Georgia spa town where he hoped to find a cure for his illness, "broadened Roosevelt as nothing else could have." Through his dealings with these economically distressed Southerners, he realized for the first time "what poverty meant to those who lived it daily." In turn, his battle against polio "helped people to sympathize with him as they hadn't previously." Resuming his ascent up the political ladder in 1928, Roosevelt became governor of New York, as well as the Democrats' presumptive presidential nominee, just months before the cataclysmic stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. Four years later, after routing Herbert Hoover, he set out, as Brands notes, to become the boldest president since Lincoln. That he was. Thanks to his New Deal programs, the lives of most Americans were transformed, largely for the better, and the federal government assumed vast new power over the economy, setting off a furor over the role of government that has roiled American politics to this day. His was an intensely personal presidency. He insisted on being at the center of everything, ceding authority to no one. Running for re-election in 1936, he told an aide: "There's one issue in this campaign. It's myself, and people must either be for me or against me." A vast majority were for him, as his victory proved. Ironically, however, the landslide -- and the hubris it helped engender in FDR -- contributed to what Brands calls "the biggest mess of his presidency": his attempt in 1937 to pack the Supreme Court, which he viewed as anti-New Deal. The effort to dilute the court, and his subsequent attempt to purge New Deal opponents in Congress, resulted in a Republican resurgence in the 1938 congressional elections and a revolt by conservative Democrats. His charisma and political instincts having failed him, he lost not only the opportunity to expand the New Deal further but also the aura of invincibility that had surrounded him since 1932. The outbreak of war in Europe gave him another chance "to rise to greatness." Roosevelt never fully recovered his political sure-footedness, demonstrating at times a diffidence and reluctance to take forthright action. Nonetheless, under his stewardship, the United States ended World War II not only victorious but the only major combatant more powerful and prosperous than it had been at the war's beginning. When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, "He couldn't have timed his exit better," Brands writes. "He left on a high note, before the predictable discord set in."
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Another Solid History by H.W. Brands
I am a big fan of H.W. Brands, so I was excited when I learned that FDR was going to be his next release. Brands' literary style is superb; he always provides ample background into the subject so that the reader walks away with a thorough understanding, yet he is able to portray these people in an engaging way so one never has the feeling of having read a dry textbook.

Traitor To His Class is an exceptional book. You get all the background, not only of FDR, Eleanor, Sara, & family, but also of the political scene of the time including TR and Woodrow Wilson, the failed economy and FDR's New Deal, WWII and Churchill from the ingenious 'lend lease' up through Pearl Harbor, Truman and ultimately his death at Warm Springs. Brands is able to place the reader inside the mindset of FDR as all of this history is being made.

It is difficult to write a concise review of such a well-researched and masterfully written work. If you've read Brands before, you'll love Traitor To His Class just as much if not more than his other works. For those who are new to Brands and are looking for an FDR biography/history, I would highly recommend this one due to the attention to detail and intelligent yet friendly presentation. You won't be disappointed.

Fearless Leader at Our Helm
Traitor to His Cause

When I first saw the size of this book, I hesitated to read something so daunting, but I was born in 1930, my parents were Republicans and didn't know the overall picture and only saw what seemed to be waste occurring. I decided to read this book to determine the truth of events that I could remember from having been a child. Although I stray from reviewing the book per se, since this has already been adequately done, I want to show the readers how this man left a lasting impression and love by the American people, and his enemies were usually of a political nature. It is truly difficult to comprehend how an individual raised in an atmosphere of such wealth and power could turn his back on it as he did.

This author did such an excellent job of showing Roosevelt, the man, and how hard he worked to finally get to the Presidency. The book deeply covered the corruption of politics in D.C. and the country and the maneuvering that took place. It also showed how FDR could manipulate people. This book truly opened up politics as it was and is. In the newsreels he never showed his physical pain caused by the braces. In fact, the newsreels photographed him in such a way that most of us did not know how crippled he was. I never would have thought of him as being handsome because I saw him on the newsreels when he was older. The newspapers never revealed his extra-marital relationships and so that came as a shock years later to the public at large.

I truly commend his consideration of the people of Warm Springs, Georgia, which caused him to try to increase wages for the very poor, which the book hints he never realized until he had spent time in the rural areas. His developing the resort into a place for his comfort and then for the healing of other polio victims must have come from a facet of his inner being not exhibited before.

I saw the little white house at Warm Springs, which looked like a hunting cabin--very unpretentious. There was a bedroom adjacent to FDR, which was occupied by Missy LeHand who was his secretary and with him throughout the rest of his life. There was a movie shown at Warm Springs revealing that Eleanor did not like it and would not live there. In the beginning the roof leaked, wind whistled through the walls and it was too rugged for a city-bred woman. She also strenuously objected to FDR paying for it with the bulk of his inheritance.

No one can imagine the hardships of the years from 1930 to about 1942 for the American people. Rich and poor alike lost their money in the banks when the banks failed and could not pay off depositors. My parents lost their savings of $5,000, which in those days was about like $50,000 now. The failure of the banks left people destitute and starving. I didn't understand why he called in all of the gold from private citizens. Probably every type of catastrophe conceivable for a country to experience faced FDR. He was highly criticized for instituting the CCC's, which one ignorant talk show host compared it to slave labor. One man who worked in the CCCs said it was the only labor available to teenagers and kept them off of the street and starving. They got three good meals a day, a bed and $15 a month. That was more than he would have received in his household. Our great parks are a result of their labor. Families who were hungry sent their children to relatives to care for. The books by Steinback truly represent some of the horrors of those times because the dust bowl exaggerated the already collapse of much of American life. In the West, some of the family men who were on welfare later were hired by a government agency who built federal projects like Grand Coulee dam in Washington State.

During the war years, Roosevelt carried the weight of maintaining the morale of this country when so many young men were drafted to the military to go to a foreign country and probably be killed. It is obvious now that Roosevelt knew that at some time Japan would attack, but we were an isolationist country as the book shows and how difficult it was for him to help Churchill and Great Britain. I remember the newsreels showing ships carrying Lend Lease materials for England that later were sunk by German submarines. All of this was very frightening to us and Roosevelt's fireside chats helped maintain calm and determination in this country. He stirred up the civilians to deal with rationing of gas, food, sugar, the cumbersome ration cards and instilled in us children an energy to do our part by such measures as finding discarded scrap iron that could be reused for war time.

This man was a giant, which the book shows, yet also covers his mistakes and weaknesses. This book truly filled in the blanks for me and also added in a most interesting way the life of this man. I can truly recommend it for everyone who believes in this country.

Thorough scholarship and an impressive eye for story.
This Review was originally posted at http://blog.semcoop.com

After reading H.W. Brands 800 page biography "Traitor to His Class," I know a great deal more about FDR than I do about any member of my family, and I love my family.

Brands renders elegant the full orbit of Roosevelt's life, replete with stirring descriptions of the constellation of out-sized bodies and satellite characters who exerted their cosmic pull upon Roosevelt's political revolution.

He had help. Victorian Age America conspired for Roosevelt's benefit, and Brands' narrative sketches a turn of the century political landscape where America and the world are organized to showcase the economic, military, and moral dignity of the governing class: Episcopalians living along the Eastern Seaboard. In this time, God and Government were in the able stewardship of Republican WASPs. These upright elites had routed the South during the Civil War and spent the next few generations lording it over the nation, and from Brands portrayal, they sound not terribly unlike the World War II generation, combining "nearly all the the business interests of the country and added sufficient numbers of urban workers and mid-western farmers to lock up the White House and Congress." The Democrats, on the other hand, were a mixed stew of immigrants, leftovers, rubes, and hayseeds, "with its shotgun multiple marriage of country and city, of southern white supremacist and northern ethnics, of Bible-thumping conservatives and agnostic liberals."

The Roosevelt's set comprised the small group of good Republican Episcopalians who really ran the world. They had names like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Ellery Sedgwick, Breckinridge Long, and Endicott Peabody- an appellation that can only give itself to someone very white, or someone very, very black, such a name does not admit of temperate hues or Jews. This East Coast elite ministered to the lower classes--including Catholics-- while at the same time reminding them of their place, a dual task requiring years of preparation. To this end, Groton boarding school and the Ivy Leagues produced civic minded Anglophile federal administrators, deputies, assistants, associates, and secretaries. For reasons of constitutional fidelity, Congressmen were culled proportionally from other states across the Union, but to be sure, their congressional offices were staffed with Yalies doing the heavy lifting. As a show of magnanimity, the good Republican sons and daughters of the Union allowed their Presidents to be harvested from Ohio: "Ohio grew Presidents like Iowa grew corn."

The Northern Democratic machines worked in the way of an syndicate, where party bosses doled out jobs to recently arrived immigrants, in exchange for votes. In the South, as Mark Twain penned, the Democrats political energies were spent waxing nostalgically of the era befo' the waw, or smarting over the dread realities durin' the waw, or lamenting their shrinking holdings aftah the waw. The Western Democrats were rogues, second sons and lawless pioneers. In the end, it was the well-mannered, landed Republican Episcopalians, those who sailed for leisure and said "bully," who made sure the people's business was done.

For Roosevelt, money flowed from both bloodlines. His father, James Roosevelt, was a chummy businessman in respectable society, a widower, and casual Democrat from an established Republican clan. His mother, Sara Delano, came from drug dealers. The drug was opium trafficked on the Oriental Sea, thousands of miles away, such that William Delano could consider himself a lucrative businessman in the independent pharmaceutical trade. William Delano approved of Sara's marriage to James Roosevelt, granting a special exemption from Delano's profound and good humored political prejudice, "I will not say that all Democrats are horse thieves," he declared in a moment magnanimity. "But it would seem that all horse thieves are Democrats." And from this political accident of birth, some would call it a defect, sprang Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a traitor to his class.

But for the occasional sickness, FDR matriculated breezily and with ruddy good humor through the cold showers, dawn revelry, and the Greek declensions of Groton; the social clubs and Crimson of Harvard; and landed on his wedding day to hear Uncle Teddy toast his union with all of the ego befitting the Rough Rider. Imagine Bill Clinton walking into your wedding, one wonders if the weak would faint from his charisma or from oxygen deprivation as the air drew from the room. "Theodore, who could never resist an audience, strode forward and hypnotized the guests in his usual fashion. Years later, Eleanor recalled the moment distinctly: 'Those closest to us did take time to wish us well, but the great majority of the guests were far more interested in the thought of being able to see and listen to the President; and in a very short time this young married couple were standing alone.' Eleanor of course said nothing, although she surely hoped that her new husband would speak up. But he was as smitten as the rest. 'I cannot remember that even Franklin seemed to mind.'"


As to the players, central casting delivered a team of talent, and Brands digs through a trove of diaries and notes to fill out the desires of the much put upon Eleanor Roosevelt, who cut her social activist teeth when Roosevelt sent her out to be his eyes and ears on the streets of New York; the loyal and canny Louise Howe; plucky, do-gooding Harry Hopkins, straight-talking Wendell Willkie, the much harassed and harassing Al Smith; Francis Townsend, the retired doctor who, and by the way, begat Social Security; Walter Lippman, a reporter second only to George Will in my estimation, in expressing with linguistic felicity, the wrong side of a great many issues; the frenetic populist Louisiana Governor Huey Long, a force of blustering nature closer to Hurricane Katrina than a mere mortal; and the terrifying phenomenon of Douglass MacArthur.

Brands recounts Roosevelt's awe of MacArthur, after the General handled a group of disgruntled veterans protesting on the White House Lawn:

"You said Huey was the second most dangerous person, didn't you?" he asked Roosevelt..."You heard it all right," he answered. "I meant it. Huey is only the second. The first is Doug MacArthur. You saw how he strutted down Pennsylvania Avenue. You saw that picture of him in the Times after the troops chased all those vets out with tear gas and burned their shelters. Did you ever see anyone more self-satisfied? There's a potential Mussolini for you. Right here at home. The head man in the Army. That's a perfect position if things get disorderly enough and good citizens work up enough anxiety." Roosevelt explained that he knew MacArthur from the World War. "You've never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most portentous style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from an oracle's cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final. Besides, he's intelligent, a brilliant soldier like his father before him...if all this talk comes to anything-- about government going to pieces and not being able to stop the spreading disorder-- Doug Macarthur is the man. In his way, he's as much a demagogue as Huey. He has as much ego, too. He thinks he's infallible-- if he's always right, all people need to do is to take orders. And if some don't like it, he'll take care of them in his own way."

Brands' Roosevelt grew from a self-possessed, hungry politician, making a name for himself as a Democrat whose Protestant prep school sensibilities bucked the vagaries of Tammany Hall machine politics-- Roosevelt's independent wealth purchased partial immunity from Tammany Hall's attractive structural electoral support---through to become Assistant Navy Secretary who used those Tammany skills to shunt shipbuilding jobs to his home state in earnest, far-sided preparation for a Gubernatorial run, into a crafty Washington pol who strung out Stalin for years before finally engaging in World War II, eventually relieving the pressure Stalin faced on the Eastern front of the war. One knows Brands' portrayal cuts a compelling form when even Joseph Stalin emerges as a sympathetic figure. Roosevelt's conception of the troika of world leaders (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) moved the President to cajole Stalin into having the Soviet Union "keep Hitler occupied and to kill Germans-- lots and lots of Germans. Every German who died on the easter front was one fewer the Americans and British would have to fight themselves, when their turn came."



In telling Roosevelt's story, Brands admirably blends the monumental, antiquarian, and critical aspects of the President's life.
The Monumental: Roosevelt took the United States off the gold standard by cleverly-placed press statements, bank holidays, and surreptitious legislative sleights of hand tantamount to a daring feat of prestidigitation. Imagine the American economy in the body of a juggler. The juggler uses both hands to keep three balls in the air, the true artist keeps balls in the air by using one hand, Roosevelt led the nation to dare performing this act without using hands at all, and the American Economy has been supported by air ever since, and such was the religious conversion of the American economy, with the dollar dancing, dipping and defying gravity by faith alone.
The Antiquarian: Roosevelt's romantic dalliances. It's always sad when the good aren't faithful.
The Critical: Roosevelt may have achieved too much political success after his first term. With a sweeping electoral mandate and congressional majority, he became resentful of the Supreme Court, over-reached and tried mightily to change the constitution of the court to suit his favor. In Brands' narrative, this failure to pack the Court begins the story of a manipulative President, one who had very little compunction uttering this campaign phrase: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent to any foreign wars." Then put those voters on boats storming Omaha Beach. The result leaves this reader to believe that it's possible the world would be a better place if Wendell Willkie had won in 1940. Willkie would have gotten us in the war but possibly without casually interning Japanese-American citizens for the bargain.

Brands has written sixteen books on American Themes, all, it seems, in tacit preparation for Roosevelt's story. The biography reads as if Brands sifted through the accumulated research of his lifetime to create a full picture of the man. Bravo. Do not buy this book here, though. Buy it at your local bookstore.