FDR's legacy.

• Author: Walker, Martin
• Position: Book Review

Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003), 1360 pp., $40.

THE LEGACY of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is crumbling. His great political gift to the Democratic Party--the extraordinary coalition that dominated American presidential politics for two decades, the influence of which endured in the House of Representatives until 1994--has finally broken. First challenged by the Dixiecrats in 1948 and then by the Goldwater campaign of 1964, a century of Southern white devotion to the Democratic cause was finally dissolved by Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Acts. That block of Southern votes, much enlarged by air-conditioning, right-to-work laws, foreign investment and economic vigor, has now transferred its loyalty to the Republicans. Without those votes, the remnants of Roosevelt's coalition have found it difficult to assemble clear majorities in the national electorate. Since the Civil Rights Acts, the only Democrats who have been able to outflank this Republican garrison and reach the presidency have been white Southerners.

The Roosevelt inheritance in foreign policy, not in full-blooded American engagement in the world but in a strategy that melded military alliances, declarative statements of global principle and new international institutions with the United Nations in pride of place, has come under increasing challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union, fifty years to the month after the attack on Pearl Harbor bombed America into its global role. The Cold War, with its Marshall Plan and the NSC-68 document that committed

an unprecedented standing army to the defense of NATO, Japan and South Korea, was waged under a grand strategy that took its precedent and its respect for allies directly from FDR's World War II template. If the new phase that finally replaces the "post-Cold War era" is indeed to be "the global war on terrorism", then it is being waged under the principle that the mission defines the coalition, rather than Roosevelt's conviction that coalition maintenance was an end-in-itself.

Roosevelt's third important legacy was the harnessing of the financial power of the Federal government in the heroic effort to confront the Great Depression and save capitalism from itself. For the first time in peace, the Federal government's share of GDP soared above 10 and then above 20 percent. The era of Big Government had come, along with routine deficit-spending in peacetime and a large and permanent bureaucracy, and it remains to this day, despite President Bill Clinton's assertion that the era was over. Along with it came Roosevelt's other profound legacy, the transformation of the federal government into an instrument of income redistribution through Social Security, which established the responsibility of the state for the welfare of its elderly citizens. This too is now coming under challenge, as an aging population, accustomed to ever more lavish state maintenance, starts to test the political and fiscal limits of Roosevelt's redistributive system.

ROOSEVELT'S eminence (and most biographical assessments rank him alongside Washington and Lincoln) may have obscured the degree to which his achievements are being eroded. And Conrad Black, who found time amid the distractions of running a global media empire to write this monumental and admirable biography, challenges the very idea of their erosion. He lists in his conclusion seven great Rooseveltian achievements and then argues that they paved the way for something even greater. Few would disagree with at least the first four, and probably the last two, that Black claims for his subject.

First, "he was, with Winston Churchill, the co-savior of Western civilization."

Second, Roosevelt secured "the anchoring of the United States in the world." He "led American opinion from profound isolationism in 1937 to accepting war rather than an Axis victory in 1941, even before Pearl Harbor galvanized the nation." This, according to Black, "was arguably the greatest tour de force in the history of democratic government."

Third was Roosevelt's "reinvention of the American state." The President "involved the government in many areas where its presence had been limited or non-existent", making him "both the savior of American capitalism and the foremost reformer in the country's history." Because of Roosevelt's achievement, Black argues, "American capitalism ceased to be a menace to itself and became an unambiguous engine to greater and better distributed prosperity." Roosevelt thereby "restored the confidence of Americans in their country."

Fourth, Roosevelt "was an almost uniformly...