Franklin D.Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln

Competing Perspectives on Two Great Presidencies

William D. Pederson, Michael R Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315498591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt are widely considered the two greatest presidents of the past two centuries. How did these two very different men rise to power, run their administrations, and achieve greatness? How did they set their policies, rally public opinion, and transform the nation? Were they ultimately more different or alike? This anthology compares these two presidents and presidencies, examining their legacies, leadership styles, and places in history.

I

DUAL GREATNESS IN THE WHITE HOUSE

1

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Abraham Lincoln

Ronald D. Rietveld

In one way or another, the Roosevelts have long been associated with the Lincolns, especially President Abraham Lincoln. Both President Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, became attached to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Talking about statecraft in the White House, Theodore Roosevelt declared: “My experiences in all these matters gives me an idea of the fearful time Lincoln must have had in dealing with the great crises he had to face.”¹ At the time of TR’s swearing in as president on March 4, 1905, Secretary of State John Hay, Lincoln’s young presidential secretary and his father’s friend, gave the new president a ring with a locket of hair that he had taken from the head of the dead Lincoln.² TR’s Lincoln was much more “direct.”

Many years removed, and much more “indirect,” Franklin Roosevelt’s Abraham Lincoln was an example to be used, manipulated, and emulated. As Merrill Peterson so aptly declared in Lincoln in American Memory: “Lincoln … was an acquired taste which he indulged for calculated political effect.” More than most presidents, FDR measured himself by his official ancestors who were instruments of historic change as they led the nation from one phase of development to another. As with most Americans, he had been taught to revere Abraham Lincoln. He thus appropriated the icon of the Republican Party—their sixteenth president—for his own purposes.³

By the time of his death, shortly before the end of another war, FDR achieved a popular stature equal to that of President Lincoln. Indeed, he ranked even higher than the martyred president in the public opinion polls of 1945 and 1946.⁴ With great success, FDR had consciously wrapped himself in the Lincoln mantle in his presidential years and, using Lincoln’s own words, told the 1944 Democratic national convention: “With firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in. …” These words FDR said were “as applicable today as they were in 1865.” In October of his last presidential campaign, FDR reminded an audience that “we are holding a national election while the Nation is at war” for the first time since 1864, and then quoted Lincoln at the expense of his contemporary Republicans.⁵

Long before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was linked with Lincoln as a commander-in-chief as their careers converged. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt unified the nation behind a war defined in moral terms. Both inspired his fellow Americans with eloquence to self-sacrifice. Both conducted the struggle to a successful conclusion, though neither lived to see the end of war. And, indeed, both Lincoln and Roosevelt died in April on the eve of final victory.⁶

Lincoln’s Influence on Young Roosevelt

The Oyster Bay Roosevelt, Theodore Sr., endeavored to serve the Union by using his philanthropic resources on behalf of its war effort, assuaging a guilty conscience for not serving in the war. He designed a program that encouraged soldiers to send home their pay and thus ease the sufferings of their families, a task which kept him months in Washington and involved frequent meetings with President Lincoln himself. Although physically shorter, Theodore Sr. was more than once mistaken for Lincoln while walking down the street with Lincoln’s young secretary, John Hay. It was said that Theodore became a favorite of Mrs. Lincoln who asked him to escort her while shopping for bonnets.⁷ With a clear and definite connection with the Lincoln White House, Lincoln became a hero to the six-year-old “Teedee.” On April 24, 1865, TR watched the funeral cortege of the martyred president as it passed through Union Square area from the brownstone which belonged to his grandfather, Cornelius Van Schaack Roosevelt, a great grandson of Johannes, one of the two founding brothers of the Roosevelt clan and the most prominent member of the Roosevelt family when Lincoln died.⁸

The Hyde Park Roosevelt, James, a great grandson of Jacobus, the other founding brother of the Roosevelt clan, had chosen not to serve in the Civil War, like the first Theodore. Possessing wealth and a good name, and no guilt, he travelled extensively in Europe during and after the war years. While in Europe, James hobnobbed with fellow Americans, like General George McClellan, a fellow Democrat. James may have shared McClellan’s bitter detestation of Lincoln and his emancipation policy for blacks.⁹ Franklin’s Lincoln heritage was in marked contrast to that of Theodore, his fifth cousin, much more “indirect.” However, FDR, the future president, would link his distant relative with the great leaders of the Republic Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson—and Abraham Lincoln.¹⁰

Young Franklin Roosevelt had his own impressions of Lincoln, especially the orator at Gettysburg. While at Harvard, the young man took a course in public speaking. This was in the closing days of the golden age of the Emerson school of oratory with “the bellowing, shouting, overdramatic technique.” FDR enrolled in the public speaking course of Professor George Pierce, whose courses in drama were famous both at Harvard and Yale. Young Roosevelt and the professor differed in their interpretation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, enough to cause the young man to withdraw from the course after a few weeks. They could not agree on the way Lincoln delivered his famous address at Gettysburg that November day in 1863. FDR slouched to the rostrum and spoke the short address in a monotone without any gestures. Baker wanted rounded, resonant periods with gestures and all the other elocutionary tricks of oratory. That was not FDR’s Lincoln.¹¹

From the days when FDR was a young lawyer, he had forecast a bright future for himself and the presidency certainly was a plausible goal. For FDR, the White House was a familiar place, where his cousin had lived. TR was an example to follow. FDR’s reason which he gave for not seeking the presidential office was that he had seen so much of presidents. He had personally known five, and the presidency was an office that he wished to have no part of. However, Ted Morgan writes in FDR: A Biography that “in fact, he felt he had been groomed for the job. It was the natural conclusion to having been taken to meet Grover Cleveland as a child, to having been a frequent guest of Cousin Teddy’s, to having worked with Wilson during his two terms.”¹²

Lincoln the Politician and Roosevelt’s Ambition

As he drew on the usable past, FDR identified with former presidents who were links in a chain and were tutors, just like his boyhood tutors at Hyde Park. He admired Washington for governing in a time of crisis with difficult tasks and endless problems to overcome. But as a member of Wilson’s cabinet during the attacks on the president in 1920, Roosevelt recalled from history that “most of our great deeds have been brought about by the Presidents who were not tools of Congress but were true leaders of the nation who so truly interpreted the needs and wishes of the people that they were supported in their great tasks. It seems to be written in our history that at some period in the lives of all of our great men they have been made the peculiar object of concerted attack and vilification,” he said. “It was true of Washington; it was true of Thomas Jefferson; it was true of Andrew Jackson.” Then he added: “It was true of Lincoln himself. He was called a usurper, a traitor, and a tyrant. One of his own party accused him of treachery.”¹³ This Wilsonian Democrat found the Lincoln example a comfort. He would set about transforming Lincoln into a symbol for the “new” Democratic party.

It was “the reactionists in the Republican party” who had created sectionalism in the United States, Roosevelt boldly declared. “Before the first stone was laid for the first memorial to Abraham Lincoln his wise policy of forgiveness and forgetfulness had been superseded and the carpetbagger introduced into American national life,” Roosevelt attacked these Lincoln traitors who called themselves Republicans. In fact, as far as he was concerned, the United States had no real leader between the death of Lincoln in 1865 and the rise of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. By 1928, FDR believed that Wilson was the last great leader and that the present gray period might just last another ten years, unless a Democratic presidential aspirant were to be successful. Roosevelt was indignant that Lincoln belonged to that rival party. Anticipating the future use of Lincoln, the newly inaugurated governor of New York wrote the journalist and historian Claude Bowers on April 3, 1929: “I think it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own. The Republican party has certainly repudiated, first and last, everything that he stood for.” He added: “That period from 1865 to 1876 should be known as ‘America’s Dark Age.’ I am not sure that we are not headed for the same type of era again.” The ground work was laid for the Roosevelt claim to the Lincoln legacy.¹⁴

As the Great Depression began, the Republican party still claimed to be the party of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln’s birthday continued to be a Republican feast across the nation. On February 12, 1931, President Herbert Hoover delivered a nationwide radio address from the White House in which he spoke of Lincoln’s invisible presence in the corridors of the executive mansion—the citadel of power. The southwest room where seventy years before Lincoln’s office had been located now served as his own study. Above the mantel hung the engraving of The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. He had found four chairs from the Lincoln era and had hung up a steel engraving of Lincoln which had accompanied him and Lou on all their overseas journeys.¹⁵

From the Lincoln office by radio, President Hoover praised Lincoln as a great builder and liberator. In the current economic crisis, he warned of the dangers which centralized government and the invasion of individual liberty would bring to the American people. As Hoover reviewed Lincoln’s role as the Great Emancipator, he could not find any precedent for a major expansion of state power to fight the depression. Federal control would only destroy the “opportunity of every individual to rise to that highest achievement of which he is capable,” and would ultimately lead to a “superstate where every man becomes the servant of the State and real liberty is lost.” By no means was this the kind of government “Lincoln sought to build.” President Hoover believed that President Lincoln had built a nation of villagers and the depression would be beaten, therefore, on the local level. Invoking Lincoln’s image, Hoover dedicated the remodeled Lincoln tomb in Springfield that following June. On February 12, 1932, Hoover again spoke to the nation from Lincoln’s White House office and pled with the American people to evidence the same kind of commitment, courage and resourcefulness as the people had given under Lincoln’s leadership. After his electoral defeat, Hoover delivered his farewell address before the National Republican Club in New York City on Lincoln’s birthday, 1933—still claiming Lincoln’s support. The American humorist, Will Rogers, quipped that “If it hadn’t been for Lincoln the Republicans … would be short of a cause for celebrating.”¹⁶

Hoover’s understanding and use of the Republican president made it more difficult for FDR to use Lincoln. In addition to the fact that Lincoln was a Republican from Pigeon Creek, Kentucky and New Salem, Illinois, FDR was from Dutchess County, New York, and Hyde Park. But he chose to use Lincoln in his first campaign for the presidency in 1932. At a Jefferson Day dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota on April 18, Roosevelt drew on his tutors of the past. “We have had in our own history three men who chiefly stand out for the universality of their interest and of their knowledge—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.” All three of these men knew at first hand every crosscurrent of national and international life. And of the three, Jefferson was in many ways “the deepest student—the one with the most inquiring and diversified intellect and, above all, the one who at all times looked the farthest into the future, examining the ultimate effects on humanity of the actions of the present.” This was the Jefferson “so big in mind and in spirit” who knew that the average man would understand. Jefferson had asked support against the errors of others who condemned what they would not, if seen in all its parts. This was the essential point of view that truly great leaders of every generation hold—including Lincoln. “Abraham Lincoln had it,” FDR declared. “We could say today, as he said in 1861, ‘physically speaking we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassible wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other, but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse must continue between them.’” And then FDR boldly concluded with Lincoln: “I say with Lincoln, ‘Having thus chosen our course, without guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God and go forward without fear and with manly hearts.’”¹⁷

During this first presidential campaign, Roosevelt had carefully selected Lincoln metaphors as when he asserted that “no nation can long endure half bankrupt.” He proceeded cautiously after his nomination. So much so that Walter Lippmann called him a master of the saddle, “a highly impressionable person, without firm grasp of public affairs and without very strong convictions,” words which read strangely now. Lippmann’s evaluation of Roosevelt seemed on the target for the electorate of 1932. “Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people,” Lippmann posited. “He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for office, would like to be President.” They voted against Hoover rather than for Roosevelt and he intended it to be so. For Roosevelt himself, the differences between the two were compounded of many different things. FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt had once divided American presidents into “Buchanan” and “Lincoln” types. The first type were those who remained inactive in the middle of a national crisis and the Congress whittled away at executive power; the second type were those who had used their constitutional powers to the full in order to do exactly what the nation wished them to do. When FDR appraised Hoover, he had TR’s presidential division in mind. Thus, tensions between the two men were never resolved.¹⁸

Lincoln the Politician, President Roosevelt’s Example for Policy—1933–1939

The nation was in the midst of great crisis when Roosevelt became president. If a leader can associate a current crisis with the actions of a president like Lincoln, he can give an immediacy and a focus which sets the nation on the path to resolution. As Lincoln before him, FDR had a will to assume primary responsibility for events, and a will to make decisions regarding them. Lincoln once admitted that “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess that events have controlled me.” FDR would claim the sa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Dual Greatness in the White House
• Part II: Comparative Political Leadership
• Part III: Teaching a Legacy
• Chronology
• Biographical Digest
• Selected Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index