Search - American Experience: FDR on DVD

Necessarily incomplete but filled with fascinating film foot

Robert Moore | Chicago, IL USA | 02/23/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The America Experience on PBS has in fifteen years produced not one but two series on FDR, this one released in 1994 and a more recent one ine 2005. Until recently I had seen neither, despite being a pretty serious student of Roosevelt's presidency. My bookshelf devoted to FDR contains no less than twenty-five volumes, many of them quite thick. I also have many other volumes deeply relevant to the time, including books on the Great Depression and World War II. So it was quite a shock to me how much I gained by seeing this film. As far as events in Roosevelt's life and career go, I don't believe I learned a single new thing in the documentary. In fact, I was consistently conscious of how much was being left out, which was unavoidable given the relatively short length of the series.



What made the documentary so exciting was the extraordinary amount of footage detailing FDR's life. For instance, I knew that there were only two photographs showing FDR in his wheelchair and only four seconds of film footage showing him walking where you could tell he wasn't able to use his legs. All were used here. The most fascinating of all was footage from him playing in the pool at Warm Springs with some of the patients there. It reveals as no book can his sense of playfulness, his love for people, and his famous delight in having fun. Those few moments are all by themselves worth the effort of watching this. Reading all the biographies on Roosevelt as well as the various policy studies give a deep knowledge of the events or Roosevelt's three terms in office (he died only three months into his fourth), but the view they give of his charm and personality are necessarily dry and abstract. The film footage in this documentary is extraordinary at showing precisely why he was such an immensely popular president (he lived before the advent of scientific polling but one could make a solid case for his being the most popular president during his time in office since Washington - certainly no president since FDR has come anywhere close, though based on numbers Eisenhower, JFK, and Clinton are distant seconds, leaving out Obama simply because he has been president for too short a period of time to be considered). This documentary brings Roosevelt to life in a way that no book can.



I give this five stars simply because I felt that I took so much away from it. Newcomers to Roosevelt need to understand that a simply vast amount of information was left out, some of it controversial, some of it positive, some of it merely neutral. For instance, shockingly little is said about the major relationships in FDR's life apart from Eleanor, his mother, Louis Howe, Missy Lehand, and Lucy Mercer. There is no mention of the role of Jim Farley in his presidential campaigns, which was huge. I believe there was only one mention of Harry Hopkins in any way whatsoever, despite the fact that after the death of Louis Howe (itself completely unremarked upon) Hopkins because FDR's closest advisor and most effective lieutenant, even living in the White House for several years during the war. There was brief mention of how important that Missy Lehand was to Roosevelt, but my own feeling is that this was underplayed, and there was no mention of her debilitating stroke and eventual death. The deaths of Howe and Lehand, and Hopkins's moving out of the White House would seem to be crucial to explaining near the end of the documentary precisely why Franklin felt so lonely in the White House.



Even more surprising was the utter lack of mention of the key friendships in Eleanor's life, some of these deeply controversial. Many have speculated about her relationship with Lorena Hickok. I personally think the evidence that they were lovers is pretty thin. Her own children have speculated about the amorous nature of several of their father and mother's relationships. The fact that most believed that their mother was not comfortable with a physical relationship with anyone, male or female, and that sex was primarily a duty in order to produce children highlights just how unlikely it is that Eleanor might have had a lesbian lover. There is brief film footage of Eleanor's two friends with whom she shared Val-Kill, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman (who were lovers), so we do know that Eleanor wasn't off put by homosexual relationships (this was true of Franklin as well). But the most amazing lacunae in the film was the failure to mention Earl Miller at all. I've always felt (and some of her children did as well), that if Eleanor did have a lover in her life, it was Earl Miller. At the very least, he played the role in her life that Missy Lehand played in Franklin. Just as Missy was a constant and never-ceasing presence in his life until her stroke, so Earl Miller was a persistent presence in Eleanor's life the last several decades of their lives. They even got apartments beside each other in New York City. And they were constant companions even after his marriage (his wife citing Eleanor as one of the reasons she was asking for a divorce later). What makes the complete failure to mention Earl Miller is that he appears as the villain in the delightful home movie that appears in the documentary. He plays the role of the pirate who gags Eleanor and then carries her off, legs kicking all the while. Some writers on the Roosevelts prefer to downplay the relationship between Miller and Eleanor because it interferes with the preferred narrative of her (possibly romantic) relationships with women, but one wonders why this documentary failed to identify either.



Likewise, there are a host of policy issues that are either not mentioned at all or only referred to in passing. For instance, they briefly mention the "Roosevelt Recession," but do not remark that what caused it was FDR's sudden passion for balancing the budget and dramatically decreasing federal spending. It turned out that the economy was still too fragile for the government to cease priming the pumps. I mention this because many on the right recently have tried to argue that FDR was somehow or other responsible for the Great Depression. The facts make such an interpretation impossible, but unless you lay out the facts misunderstanding is possible. Once FDR realized that the main cause of the recession was decreased federal spending, the government pushed out some spending bills that helped correct the decline. The documentary also made is seem like there was no preparation for war at all prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, whereas Congress had been significantly increasing military spending for the previous two years. It wasn't enough, but compared to what it had been spending before, there were some efforts to create a standing army in response to what was happening in Europe. There was no mention of the FDIC, which FDR was personally opposed to but which became along with Social Security the most successful piece of New Deal legislation.



But the truth is, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency was staggering both in its scope and its accomplishment. I honestly do not feel that any other president even remotely compares to him in terms of the breadth of his achievement. He is generally accounted as one of the three great American presidents, along with Lincoln and Washington. I have always personally felt that Washington was our most overrated president. He has one great achievement, that of making the president something less than an emperor. The more that I read about Washington, the less I find to either love or admire in him apart from that one great fact, though I do not want to trivialize that one achievement. Against Lincoln I have nothing to say. After Roosevelt, he is my favorite president. While FDR was faced with the second and third greatest crises in American history, Lincoln was faced with the greatest. And his moral leadership is unsurpassed. I think the reason that just about everyone doesn't rank Roosevelt as our greatest president is due to some of his failures: Lucy Mercer; the court packing scheme; cutting back in federal spending, resulting in the "Roosevelt Recession"; and his interpersonal aloofness. But all in all, no president in our nation's history did so much to remake the government, so much to help so many get back on their feet, and so much to save the world from tyranny. One of the most absurd claims making the circuit the past few years has been that Reagan "won the Cold War" (a claim that absolutely no one in Europe or the states forming the former Soviet Union believe or can even make sense of). But if there was one person who won WW II, it was Roosevelt. After the British armed forces had been forced to leave nearly their entire war materiel on the beaches of Dunkirk, Roosevelt helped, and within a few weeks their stocks of arms had been completely restocked. He then not only the dominant figure in leading the Allies to victory, but organized the industrial might of the United States to arm not only the United States and Britain, but the Soviet Union as well. And while Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin agreed on few things, both believed that Roosevelt was the key figure in engineering the Allied victory over the Axis.



This isn't quite the figure that arose in this documentary. But the story of this "traitor against his class" and his overcoming a debilitating illness to become arguably the dominant figure of the twentieth century is too complete for a single documentary. Nor, for that matter, even a handful of books. But if you know little about FDR, this is a decent place to start. And if you know a great deal, this is a great place to have what you already know fleshed out in exciting fashion.



Note: I do plan sometime in the next month to watch the 2005 American Experience production "FDR: A Presidency Revealed." I'll add some text here comparing that documentary with this earlier one."