F.D.R.: THE BECKONING OF DESTINY, 1882 TO 1928 by KENNETH S. DAVIS 936 pages. Putnam. $15.
The expectant father, James, middle-aged and anxious, was so grateful when things turned out well that he responded to the doctor's bill for $82 with a payment of $100. The Hudson River, Hyde Park, Democratic Roosevelts—as opposed to the Long Island Republican Roosevelts—were of course friends of that fellow New Yorker in the White House, Grover Cleveland. They sent a Dutch antique clock on the occasion of his marriage, and later, when their $100 baby was five, James and Sara took him to the White House to meet the Chief Executive. Cleveland, having his troubles, said to Franklin: "Little man, I am making a strange wish for you. It is that you may never be President."
Within a few years, Franklin, of course, consciously set out to defy that admonition. One of the remote results was this leviathan of a volume. Roosevelt literature is reaching Talmudic proportions, and the prospective reader is entitled to be skeptical. But Kenneth S. Davis is a skillful journalist, novelist, historian and biographer (Eisenhower, Stevenson, Lindbergh). What is more important, he has something to say.
Frail Humanity. The most familiar recent histories and F.D.R. biographies, like James MacGregor Burns', concentrate on the successive crises of the Depression and World War II: Roosevelt, the embattled titan, fighting for the presidency, then for economic reform, finally for democracy's very survival. Davis ends this volume in the fall of 1928, with Roosevelt about to be nominated for Governor of New York. He assesses Roosevelt not as a hero but as a man full of frail humanity.
The President to be was a pampered child who was not allowed to bathe alone until he was eight. At Harvard he was a mediocre student and rather shy with women. He did get the top editorial job at the Crimson in 1903, but that success was shadowed. Earlier he had received credit for a Crimson scoop that disclosed how Harvard's President Eliot would vote (Republican) in the 1900 national election. The information for that exclusive, as Roosevelt confessed years later, had really been obtained by a classmate.
Davis follows his man step by step through law school and into a job as law clerk with the prestigious New York City law firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. Young Roosevelt soon began telling fellow law clerks that he planned to follow in Cousin Theodore's footsteps. The first step was a seemingly hopeless contest for the state senate. But F.D.R. won as a progressive Democrat —thanks largely to the gusto of his campaign—and immediately plunged into a dangerous scrap with Boss Murphy's Tammany Hall over the selection of a U.S. Senator. Some of the book's best passages relate intricate New York politicking, with reformers pitted—as they still are today—against regulars. As a freshman state senator, Franklin often stood bravely on his principles—but wavered on other occasions when he sensed the possibility of serious political damage. He was still very much the country-squire Jeffersonian, rather slow to understand the problems of the urban workers as Fellow Democrats Al Smith, Robert Wagner and Frances Perkins did. But he worked, he learned and he grew.