The Friday Cover: FDR ruled at the height of government activism, but saw ideology as something to fear, not embrace
President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived at Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in characteristic style: beaming, from the back seat of an open car. He had earned this smile. It was June 27, 1936, and he had just been re-nominated by acclamation in the smoke-filled Philadelphia Convention Center a few blocks away. It was, arguably, the high-water-mark of his career.
Now, in a time of far less suffering and little sense of economic crisis, some Democrats are embracing the very title that Roosevelt shunned. It is, in their eyes, truth in packaging. Their proposals sound much like Roosevelt’s: using the power of the federal government to create a fairer society, in which essential services are subsidized by higher taxes on the wealthy. But unlike FDR, they say that, yes, these programs amount to socialism.
But his objections would also probably run well beyond political expediency. In Roosevelt’s experience, ideology was something to be feared, not embraced. Communism, fascism, Nazism and even the unbending capitalist principles of his conservative critics were all looming dangers to the nation’s survival. This was the underlying message of his “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech. This was the point he desperately wanted to make to those who assembled in Franklin Field.
Roosevelt began solemnly, by referring to the times as deeply fraught, and himself as a person “upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He saluted those who “put partisanship aside” to assist in the “efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses.” Roosevelt drew a line from the 18th-century royalists who tyrannized the fledgling colonies to his era’s “economic royalists,” building “new kingdoms … upon concentration of control over material things.” He warned,
The appeal to government was a plea of last resort. FDR’s administration answered the knock on the door. The wealthy, however, refused to acknowledge the problems or offer any solutions. Instead, they fell back on a biting critique of the expanded role of government, claiming it represented nothing more than Roosevelt’s ideological assault on American free enterprise.
Roosevelt’s assessment of his intentions and methods—responding to woes in a spirit of charity, crafting creative solutions, fulfilling the spirit of the Constitution and the dreams of the founders—represent the soul of pragmatism and the antithesis of ideology.of the “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech is in its brilliant last three paragraphs, when Roosevelt announces a further motive for his New Deal programs: preserving democracy and capitalism around the world.
Roosevelt’s eagerness to be seen as a pragmatist was partly a political concern: Growing numbers of critics, including his onetime friend and fellow liberal Al Smith, were starting to use the socialist label to attack him. But there was a further motive: his own resistance to the left. He often felt the sting of ideological critics on his left flank, from the liberal populist Huey Long to the gentlemanly socialist Norman Thomas.
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