The President
Roosevelt. By Gerald W. Johnson. (Hamish Hamilton. ios. 64.) IN quiet times the Presidents of the United States exercise no power. They are hedged about with safeguards designed to prey them from ruling, or rather from usurping the sovereignty of American People. "We, the People," were The authority that cumscribed the Presidential initiative ; and the Constitun originally promulgated in the name of the People created the H of the State, in Lord Bryce's words, as "a reduced and imP54 copy of the English king." He was to be an Elder State
soberly chosen by the elite of the nation, deriving his authority from his own wisdom and experience rather than from explicit executive power. This conception was never realised. One by one out- standing Presidents were driven by necessity to do things which lay outside constitutional sanction. Jefferson violated the Constitution in the Louisiana Purchase ; Jackson in the Nullification crisis ; Lincoln in the Civil War ; and in each case the American People endorsed the innovation, believing that the living man was better than the dead hand.
In our own time, the opponents of President Roosevelt have sought to create the legend that he is the first usurper ever to sit in the White House and that his conduct of the New Deal proves an autocratic intention in his purpose. The American people do not seem to think so, for they have elected him three times as President ; but the attack on him as unconstitutional and un-American persisted against the evidence of history, and many Americans believed it to be justified. To convince them 'of the contrary, Mr. Johnson wrote this book last year. His qualifications as advocate for the defence are good. He is an outstanding member of a group of men who have made the Baltimore Sun a power in American opinion ; and his knowledge of the President is derived from a sympathetic but not emotional appreciation of Mr. Roosevelt's career and personality. Mr. Johnson is, of course, addressing an American audience ; and there are passages in the book which assume much that is common knowledge to every American but unfamiliar to the British reader. To meet this difficulty, Professor Brogan (who needs no introduc- tion .to readers of The Spectator) has written a useful introduction and supplied good foinnotes wherever necessary. In the result, the British reader will find that he is taken right to the heart of the American controversy over the President and that the figure of Franklin Roosevelt—" waste and all "—stands out in stereoscopic clarity against the background of his own time. A. F. WHYTE.
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