Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt [Paperback]

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.

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.

Seldom does one find an 800-page history text to be a "page turner", but this is such a book. Brands is a superb biographer; he organizes and tells the story of the first half of the 20th century in an absolutely fascinating way. One cannot help but recognize how little people and politics have changed -- the same greed and corruption among politicians and Wall Street, the same theme of conservative versus progressive politics and of government once again coming to the rescue of free-market capitalism. The similarities to the current economic and political situation require careful consideration by the reader.

Put this together with Behrman's "The Most Noble Adventure" regarding the Marshall Plan and you follow many of the same players into the next generation. Both books are written so well as to read like novels.

A great gift for anyone interested in history and/or politics.