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Inability. The two pre-eminent influences on the U.S. during this period were conflict over political-economical reform and rapid technological advances. A theme that runs throughout the book, and will presumably be picked up and expanded in the second volume that Davis plans, is the inability of political leaders to comprehend changing technology, either in peace or war. The World War I Administration—Roosevelt served as a brash, energetic Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels—accumulated vast powers but used them clumsily and often brutally, violating many of the progressive principles that Woodrow Wilson, Daniels and Roosevelt professed. In peace, neither party could grasp what was happening to the farmer, to industry, or to the cities. With farms in trouble, factories booming and the U.S. already well on the way to becoming an urban nation, F.D.R. in 1921 made a major speech. He deplored the movement of population away from rural areas and urged that more be done to induce farm families to stay where they were. More surprisingly, he also warned that Washington and even state legislatures should stay clear of the problem. Responsibility to reverse the trend he saw as lying purely with local town and county governments.
Davis admires his subject for his courage, his shrewdness, his style, and (most of the time) his instinct to do the right thing. But Davis also says that F.D.R. must be numbered among those leaders (the vast majority) who could not really control great events and forces. He had a tendency to settle for the part of leading actor rather than seize responsibility in a difficult situation. More important, he formed no lasting political philosophy.
Why? Davis offers clues rather than conclusions. Roosevelt was a random collector—of stamps, people, ideas. He exploited his acquisitions, personal and intellectual, as needed, but rarely as part of a grand design. In the 1920s at least, despite his willingness to fight for particular schemes, compromise was never far from his mind. He made peace with Tammany, for instance, and it was Roosevelt, the sometimes stiff-necked patrician, who at various times advised Smith, the practical pol, to evade the Prohibition issue and straddle a dispute over the Ku Klux Klan. Smith refused both times — and became one of the big losers in the history of presidential politics.
Laurence I. Barrett